With summer just ahead, it looms for some little ones. Summer camp can be a frightening new experience for young children and brings on separation anxiety not unlike first day at school jitters.

I was undiagnosed, but in retrospect clearly diagnosable, with depression from age 12. For much of my youth I “other-reflected” rather than self-reflected. I made the worst attitudes of others my own. I would say that I hated the way others viewed my depression but I really just hated myself.

Hi Jennifer, I’m struggling to deal with a particular behaviour that my five and a half year old, Chandra, has been displaying. For the last three months or so, when she gets upset about something, she says she doesn’t like herself and starts to smack her head. This is very upsetting to me and even [...]

Mackenzie Carpenter of the Washington Post writes a thought provoking article entitled, “Clashing Data Bombards New Parents As Old-School Ideas Fall By The Wayside.”

Giving readers food for thought, Carpenter talks about parents over-reliance on parent advice. She cleverly points out how advice and parenting gurus change from generation to generation, leading us to wonder at the validity of any of it.

A recent article in the globegazette.com entitled “Emma, Ethan Lead Iowa’s Baby Name List” by Rod Boshart discusses the most popular baby names today. And also the anxiety that parents experience when they have to come up with a name! In days gone by your name was simply your name, the word by which to [...]

All of us have anxiety – it is an important emotion.

We need it to survive, stay safe and make good choices. Some of us are hardwired to be more anxious than others. As a therapist, I feel that more and more children are struggling with anxiety for many reasons and many parents struggle with how to help their kids cope.

My sister and I were talking the other day about how difficult we find it to NOT be helicopter parents. So naturally, this article at nytimes.com by Amanda M. Fairbanks called “Letting Your Grad Student Go” grabbed my attention.

Hi Jennifer,

I’ve always felt my daughter was maybe gifted somehow. She is 8 years old and extremely hard on herself. I think she is a perfectionist and gets very upset if she doesn’t do something perfect the first time. She then shuts down and won’t redo something. I am hoping this website might help me respond to these outbursts. She also has difficulty handling conflict with her peers. Her father (who doesn’t live with her) doesn’t think these are things to worry about but I do.

- Julie

I can’t help but notice the hype around the movie, “Where the Wild Things Are”. My daughter is seeing it twice in the upcoming couple of weeks. Once with her school and then again at a friend’s birthday party. Why are children and adults drawn to this story?

As a person familiar with anxiety and all its ramifications I read Robin Marantz Henig‘s article “Understanding the Anxious Mind” in the New York Times with great interest. Henig primarily focuses on Jerome Kagan‘s longitudinal study beginning in 1989, which looked at whether babies were easily upset or not when exposed to new things. They [...]