Imagine you are running late to work and you are frantically rushing out the door. As you’re hustling down the freeway trying not to speed (at least trying not to noticeably speed), you suddenly feel the car start to vibrate followed by a low juddering sound. You recognize that dreadful sound and realize that you have a flat tire at …
As a child and family therapist, I have met with many teenagers who have shut down. It looks like they have put up 2-foot thick concrete walls around themselves to keep their parents and other concerned adults at a distance. By the time parents contact me, months or even years of damage has already happened in the family and the …
I know of parents that are deep in debt. Not financial debt, but parental debt. What is parental debt? Parental debt, like credit card debt or any other debt, is when you want the reward or benefit of having something right now but (rather than paying for it right now) you put off paying until sometime in the future. How …
I hear of parents whose knee-jerk reaction to almost anything that their child does wrong is to take away their child’s cell-phone. “It’s the only thing they care about”, parents will tell me. “It’s the only thing that makes them do the thing I ask them to do!” Whether the misbehavior is talking back, refusing to do chores, allowing grades …
There we were, at WalMart on a Saturday afternoon. Eliza and her brother Ezra each had two weeks of allowance and they were trying to stretch it as far as possible (which isn’t easy since they only had four dollars each). I was working on my skill of patience as each of them pointed out the things that they wanted …
Do you ever feel torn between wanting your step-children to like you and knowing that you still need to have rules and discipline? Have you found that letting the biological parent handle all the discipline doesn’t work really well all the time. Blended families are becoming more and more common in today’s world. Consequently, more kids are being raised partially …
Empathy is at the heart of Love and Logic. Jim Fay and Foster W. Cline studied parents to find out why some parents got good results when disciplining, while others, who used the same methods of disciplining, got the opposite. They found that it had everything to do with showing empathy, or sadness, for the kid’s mistakes before applying the …
Are you starting to have a hard time dealing with your teen’s behavior? Do you find it a little disturbing that your son/daughter starts to say things that he/she didn’t normally say when he/she was younger? You don’t need to consult Arizona psychiatrists right away, nor feel helpless with your situation. Why is it that our children suddenly become experts …