A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Mental health disorders may onset early in life, meaning that parents and healthcare professionals need to be able to recognize the signs and intervene appropriately. And as any epidemiologist will tell you, one of the first steps of understanding an illness or condition – and how to best treat it – is to determine how [...]
Living with a severely unsettled baby has been described as a form of torture. For Laura Conway, it’s an experience still seared into her memory. When her youngest was an infant, the reflux-troubled child went through months of sleeping only in 45-minute stints. The little boy would wake up screaming, emitting a noise that Laura [...]
The most famous painting of children at play is “Children’s Games,” the 1560 work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of a town square in which children from toddlers to adolescents (scholars have counted 246) are playing a range of timeless games. There are dolls and marbles and tiddlywinks, ball games and climbing games and riding [...]
“Play has become a four-letter word.” So says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychologist at Temple University and one of the authors of a new paper about the importance of play in children’s lives. The clinical report, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommends that pediatricians write a “prescription for play” at doctor visits in the [...]
When you put a load on a piece of metal you stress it. That’s what the engineers call it. Stress. There’s actually a profession that deals only with understanding how much of a load any material can take. They’re called stress engineers. And these folks know everything about what happens when you exert a lot [...]
For years the addiction field has said that addictions were caused by genetics. If your father is an addict then you have the gene for it and you will become an addict. We now know that the gene is passed on, but it can be turned off if the child has a good and supportive, [...]
When children are chronically anxious, even the most well-meaning parents can fall into a negative cycle and, not wanting a child to suffer, actually exacerbate the youngster’s anxiety. It happens when parents, anticipating a child’s fears, try to protect her from them. Here are pointers for helping children escape the cycle of anxiety. 1. The [...]
Feelings that others are dismissive or blame parents commonly cited as reasons for not accessing help for children and young people with mental health concerns. "Cumbersome" mental health services with long waiting times and difficulties getting a referral also cited. Parents feeling blamed for their child's mental health difficulties has been cited as a common [...]
Flickr Images Every day in the United States, millions of expectant mothers take a prenatal vitamin on the advice of their doctor. The counsel typically comes with physical health in mind: folic acid to help avoid fetal spinal cord problems; iodine to spur healthy brain development; calcium to be bound like molecular Legos [...]
