Helping you to understand the mental health of children
What do you tell children about terrorism and violence Terrorism is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “The unofficial or unauthorised use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Terrorist acts have played a major part in world events, increasingly so in more recent years. Where an attack in Africa may not …
Anger is a strong emotion, it’s one of the first ones we experience as a baby when these adults around us don’t understand what we’re asking for. As we grow other people don’t do what we want them to do or give us what we want and that makes us angry too. This is all …
Guilt is a complex emotion to learn, it requires a set of rules to be known, knowledge of what it means to break them, knowledge of what they should have done and then the ability to put things right. When it’s explained like that there are a large number of composite steps involved and that’s …
Why should you have family rules Boundaries are important to children. It’s how they learn a huge number of skills, these vary according to age: As a baby boundaries set the internal regulators that we rely on as adults. We learn how far our emotions need to go before they get capped (and in turn …
What makes children hit other children More often than not when I see children hitting other children it’s due to a social need. For example they are cross with what the other child has said or done. If this is the case then this is not acceptable and they must apologise. Hitting other children is …
What causes siblings to argue There’s a whole mixture of things happening here, and part of it depends on the age of your children. First of all it may be that one or more of your children may be at the social stage where play is initiated through some kind of physical contact. We see …
What causes tantrums? Generally tantrums are caused by the brain being overloaded. Often what happens is that the brain hasn’t learnt how to process the emotions that your child is currently feeling. That’s why logic and reason don’t work at this point. And that’s why this is the point when we’ve felt like smacking them …
For adolescents it is important to stimulate the neurons growing in their mind as much as possible before they reach the middle of puberty. This help stimulate the different areas of the brain so that as it rewires over the following few years in preparation for adulthood. The best way of doing that is to …
What tomorrow’s world will be like Technology is advancing so fast that it will change the way the world operates for our children. By the time they grow up it is predicted that robots will be far cheaper than humans to do many jobs, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be a reality and that they …
Why it should be normal to speak to professionals like me. Parenting is hard, there’s no denying it, especially in the 21st Century. There’s the technology to worry about, there’s the social media, there’s the big wide world outside and there’s the attitude… Things are certainly different than when you or I grew up and the …