Five Things You Might Not Know about Attachment Between Parents and Kids

by Dr. Deborah MacNamara

A father sat in my office, visibly upset that his 7 year old son wasn’t listening to him. He recounted challenge after challenge with his son from leaving the park to getting dressed in the morning, from eruptions of frustration to bedtime battles. Exasperated, the father looked at me and asked, “Why would any child follow any parent in the first place?” It was a good question and one I couldn’t answer without making sense of attachment first.

Attachment science is the name given to the study of human relationships. Attachment is how we root our children to a secure base, create a sense of belonging and significance, and nourish them. John Bowlby, the psychiatrist who first coined the term, ‘attachment’ stated, “What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.”

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Anxiety or Aggression? When Anxiety in Children Looks Like Anger, Tantrums, or Meltdowns

by Karen Young

Anxiety can be a masterful imposter. In children, it can sway away from the more typical avoidant, clingy behaviour and show itself as tantrums, meltdowns and aggression. As if anxiety wasn’t hard enough to deal with!

When children are under the influence of an anxious brain, their behaviour has nothing to do with wanting to push against the limits. They are often great kids who don’t want to do the wrong thing, but they are being driven by a brain in high alert.

If we could see what was happening in their heads when anxiety takes hold like this, their behaviour would make sense. We would want to scoop them up and take them away from the chaos of it all. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they should be getting a free pass on their unruly behaviour. Their angry behaviour makes sense, and it’s important to let them know this, but there will always be better choices they are capable of making. 

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Mindful Parenting: How to Raise Kind and Conscious Teens

 by Aziza Seykota

Parents can often find themselves more distracted by their devices than their teens. This is especially true during the slow moments throughout our day. Slow moments are those moments where you can be with your thoughts and feelings, instead of pulling out your phone to check email, read the news, or scroll through your Facebook feed.

By habitually reaching for our devices during these moments of solitude, we miss out on valuable opportunities to know ourselves better. And you are modeling your teens relationship with technology by your own relationship with technology.

So what can we do?

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