Parent Resources

I’d thought this teaching job would be my chance to make positive changes in children’s lives. But most of the recommendations in students' IEPs were related not to reading, writing, and ’rithmetic but to behavior control and obedience to adults. And the school seemed to be working very hard to prove that the kids were disabled and to get them certified as such.

A new study in the journal Social Science and Medicine explores why French children take stimulants far less than children in the United States. The study looks at how particular forces in society, in concert with government agencies, became an effective check on stimulant marketing for kids in France.

Peter Gøtzsche discusses the results of the MTA study on ADHD drugs and the misleading statements textbooks make about ADHD treatment.

We have two guests today. One is Susan Swim, executive director of the Now I See A Person Institute, which she created in 2007...

Researchers have found further evidence that the anticholinergic effect of psychiatric drugs can lead to cognitive impairments.

My guardian decided to seek out “professional” advice about how to diminish my “outbursts.” I was perceived as a problem that needed to be extinguished into a compliant state.

We have let down our children (and ourselves) by losing touch with parental intuition and handing their care over to professionals at the first sign of a problem.

This series of thirty video interviews with leading experts from around the world is designed to help parents better understand how to raise strong, resilient kids and how to deal with the pressures exerted on them by the current dominant “mental disorder” paradigm. We hope that this interview series will provide helpful ideas that you may not be able to get anywhere else. The interviews can be found HERE.

Based on his lived experience, Ron Bassman describes his efforts to create an educational and support program that links families with survivors.

New research explores the use of broad-based school-integrated resiliency and mindfulness interventions to prevent mental health concerns before they occur.

Many individuals diagnosed with eating disorders describe and internal ‘voice,’ which may be linked to experiences of childhood trauma and dissociation.

The only way out of the epidemic of feeling-people-turned-medicated-psychiatric-patients is to rebrand and reframe feeling as a cultural collective. And I believe it starts with our messaging as parents and our orientation toward shadow elements like anger and sadness. We have to model a conscious relationship to our own dark parts, and we have to show our children what it looks like to move through these spaces. Feelings can be messy, wild, and sometimes ugly to our constrained sensibilities.

A podcast interview with Finnish psychiatrist Ben Furman in which he discusses adolescent rage and how parents can come to understand and deal with teenagers and young adults who are angry and explosive.

My 19-year-old son has been diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and ODD. He refuses to go to school or get a job; instead, he just hangs around and plays video games. He has prescriptions but refuses to take them. Frankly, he contributes nothing to the household but stress and is a bad role model for his siblings. How can I make him take his meds and shape up?

From NPR: A new report published Tuesday presents the CDC's first estimate of how many Americans are affected by adverse childhood experiences and the benefits of preventing these kinds of traumas.

Psychologist Sam Himelstein, PhD, talks about the impact of the coronavirus crisis and “social distancing” policies on adolescents, taking a look at the unique needs of teenagers and young adults and the challenges they may present for parents, caregivers, and other family members.

From The Washington Post: By the time I left the hospital, I was the scattered wreckage of a teenager, and would spend much of my subsequent adult life avoiding people.

An interview with Claudia Gold, M.D., pediatrician, infant-parent mental health specialist, author, teacher, and speaker based in western Massachusetts. We discuss the importance of human interaction in child development.

Alterations in gray matter and white matter development found in infants of mothers taking SSRI antidepressants during pregnancy.

Researchers, publishing in Toxicology Research, review the evidence that antidepressant exposure in the womb is linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in humans.

A maternal mental health expert shares how perinatal stress and the climate crisis are affecting women’s everyday lives.

From The Washington Post: Suicidal students are pressured to withdraw from Yale, then have to apply to get back into the university.

Parents must inform themselves about the flaws in the current paradigm if they are to have any chance of thinking sensibly about what might be distressing their child. Toward that end of providing information about those flaws, I interviewed Richard Hallam, author of the new book Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness: Rethinking the Nature of our Woes.

From Chronic Illness Trauma Studies: The impact of one of the ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) in particular - emotional neglect - is huge and underrecognized.

The one core ingredient on which any recovery from emotional distress depends is the one that never makes an appearance in any medical handbook or psychiatric diagnostic manual—that is, love.