Q: Some of my daughter’s 11- and 12-year-old friends want to go to a concert alone, and she is begging me to let her do the same. I don’t think they’re old enough to go to a concert without an adult, so I keep saying “no.” Am I wrong? A: If you check the blogs…
Anxiety over school shootings has become a common fear in America. When something that once seemed unthinkable happens with some regularity, added to our feeling of horror that it’s happened (again!) is another kind of alarm: Could this happen at my child’s school? And many parents have begun to worry whether the news of school…
High-profile cases of sexual abuse of children at respected places—the Horace Mann School, Joe Paterno’s locker room at Penn State, the offices of revered pediatrician Melvin Levine, the cloisters of the Catholic Church—serve to illustrate that abuse is very hard to anticipate. “We delude ourselves in to thinking that certain situations are without danger,” says…
For most parents setting boundaries for young kids’ behavior is second nature: No hitting. Don’t interrupt. We don’t grab toys out of other kids’ hands. But as they get older, and social interaction gets more complex, it’s not enough to just learn the rules. They need to learn to set boundaries for themselves and respect…
We know that children who experience abuse or neglect are “off the charts at risk,” as Dr. Joan Kaufman puts it, for psychiatric disorders like depression, anxiety and substance abuse. What’s more, they’re less likely to respond favorably to the treatments that evidence shows work well for other people. And research has shown that children…
