10 Fast Fixes To Manage Stress

Stress is a normal part of life and usually comes from everyday occurrences: Here are the best ways you can deal with everyday sources of stress. 1. Eliminate as many sources of stress as you can. For example, if crowds bother you, go to the supermarket when you know the lines won’t be too long. Clear up the clutter in your life by giving away…

Battles Over Homework: Advice For Parents

Many parents accept “battles over homework” with their children as an unavoidable consequence of responsible parenting. These battles, however, rarely result in improved learning or performance in school. More often than not, battles over homework lead to vicious cycles of nagging by parents and avoidance or refusal by children, with no improvement in a child’s school performance — and certainly no progress toward what should…

5 Ways to Find Happiness By Living in the Moment

Many people spend their day-to-day existence looking forward to an upcoming event or ruminating over one from the past. Even within the days of the week, we talk about Wednesday as “hump” day- it’s the middle of the week, and Friday is only two days away. It’s true that a future time orientation can be beneficial for helping you set goals and measure your progress toward them, and…

Building Your Parent Playlist

Many of the parents are overwhelmed with the responsibilities of parenting and taking care of young children. Whether they stay at home or work, these parents are running on a hamster wheel and getting nowhere fast when it comes to their own well-being. By neglecting opportunities to recreate and play, in isolation or with their kids, they are starving for a vacation from the “shoulds”. Addiction specialist…

Listening: A Key to Successfully Guiding Adolescents

You know who knows more about your teen’s inner life and environment than you do? HE DOES. In their struggle for independence, kids sometimes reject parental advice precisely when it may make the most sense to them. They are so uncomfortable with how much they rely on us, that circumstances that remind them of how much they need us may stir rebellion. Parents are most effective when…

“Blue Mondays” Aren’t Really Blue – So Why Do We Think They Are?

Monday was bluer than Tuesday or Wednesday? The peak-end heuristic is the tendency to emphasize peaks and recent experience when one summarizes over a period of time. In the case of the blue Monday belief, it is likely that heuristics are at work. Thinking that Monday is the worst day of the week may be based on our innate attention to change: the shift from…

Talking to Yourself: Not So Crazy After All

Self-talk, the act of giving ourselves mental messages can help us learn and perform at our best. Self-talk isn’t just motivational messages like “You can do it!” or “Almost there,” although this internal cheering section can give us confidence. There’s another kind of mental message that is even more useful, called “instructional self-talk.” This is the kind of running commentary we engage in when we’re…

In Autistic Kids, “Thinking in Words” Improves Mental Flexibility

When children with autism ‘mentally talk things through,’ they have an easier time unraveling complex everyday tasks, which may lead to more flexible thinking and a more independent life later on. For example, encouraging children to describe their actions out loud has been successful for increasing mental flexibility in typically developing children. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may benefit from verbally learning their daily schedule at school instead…

The Six Best Ways to Decrease Your Anxiety

We all know the uncomfortable feeling of anxiety. Our hearts race, our fingers sweat, and our breathing gets shallow and labored. We experience racing thoughts about a perceived threat that we think is too much to handle. That’s because our “fight or flight” response has kicked in, resulting in sympathetic arousal and a narrowing of attention and focus on avoiding the threat. We seem to…

Things Your Child’s Teacher Won’t Tell You

A look inside a teacher’s mind could help you understand lesson plans and maybe even guide your child to perform better. If we teach small children,  don’t tell us that our jobs are “so cute” and that you wish you could glue and color all day long. I’m not a marriage counselor. At parent-teacher conferences, let’s stick to your child’s progress, not how your husband doesn’t…