Farting on the couch

January 31, 2010

I once worked with a boy who had a habit, despite lactose intolerance, of being sure to drink a big glass of milk before our sessions.  He would sit on my sorry plaid couch in a decrepit, sometimes leaky, trailer on the edge of the property that held assorted special needs schools and administrative buildings […]

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Math anxiety is elementary… if you’re a girl

January 30, 2010

A recent AP science story by Randolph E. Schmid suggests that Girls may learn Math Anxiety from Female Teachers.  A cited study showed that at the beginning of a school year math ability was not related to teacher math anxiety, but by the year’s end the more anxious the kids’ teachers were about their own […]

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Enough

January 29, 2010

The human brain is a funny thing.  I have a house with magazines all over—on coffee tables, on nightstands, in the bathroom and on kitchen counters… but I’m mostly not intending to read them.  Yet when I see a magazine in my kitchen trash, it sometimes calls to me to check it out (it could […]

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Who’s counting… sheep? Sleep issues in early elementary age kids.

January 28, 2010

At some point in every child’s development our beds themselves become a boundary, challenging us parents to find the right balance between love and limits in the context of what works for our own families. A reader inquires: “We started out attachment parenting – and now struggle with keeping firm boundaries. But at night, or […]

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Kids in media overdrive

January 27, 2010

A recent story in the New York Times by Tamar Lewin, If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online discussed a recent study about how much media time kids are actually getting these days.  The researchers were stunned to learn that, after concluding in 2005 that kids couldn’t be on their computers, TVs, and cell […]

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The best weekend ever

January 26, 2010

My brother is a great story-teller with a penchant for superlatives who has a way of making everything the best, worst or most (wine, carnival ride, bad stomach moment) ever. Therefore it makes total sense that a weekend where he and I finally managed to be in the same city for more than twelve hours, […]

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Import/Export—Depression’s now big in Japan

January 25, 2010

I caught an interview recently on “Marketplace” where Kai Ryssdal talks with Ethan Watters about his book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. Watters’ thesis is that mental illness is culturally determined, and that big drug companies have systematically worked to change the way other cultures view melancholy, for example, in order […]

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What to be, or not to be, when we grow up…

January 24, 2010

A couple of months ago Motherese took up the question of what we parents might like to be when we grow up, framing things in the context of statistics that suggest that most of us have multiple careers across the span of our modern lives and lyrically looking at roads taken and not taken, particularly […]

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Tinkle Tinkle Little Star… What to do about bedwetting

January 23, 2010

Amongst the many things I didn’t like about summer camp, being on the bottom bunk below a bed-wetter compromised even the would-be refuge of sleep.  Yet despite fearing that it would leak through the half-inch of a sorry mattress and rain on me, I still felt compassion for the poor fellow-eight-year-old treading up the hill […]

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Suicide: What to do when kids say they want to kill themselves

January 22, 2010

I had already been planning on addressing suicidality in children in Privilege of Parenting when the following comment showed up: “A friend of mine and her family are in pain.  Their 24-year old daughter died last week in an apparent suicide.  She was about to turn in her Master’s thesis, and I don’t think there […]

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