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Eating as a family has benefits for kids.
New research has identified a powerful prevention tool in the fight to keep our children fit and healthy: Family meals. We already know that eating dinner together has psychological benefits. Regular family dinners have been said to help prevent behavioral problems, eating disorders, and even suicidal thoughts in children. Now we hear that eating together as a family reduces the risk of childhood obesity by 12%, and increases the chances of your children eating healthy foods by double that amount.
Knowing family meals are what’s best for kids doesn’t make it any easier to make them happen. Juggling schedules and appetites can be so daunting that many, if not most parents throw up their hands and feed the family whenever time allows. How do you eat together as a family when one, if not two parents doesn’t get home until well after your kids are ready to eat? Continue reading »
For women, mid-life crises come early
Ladies first! New research on mid-life crises finds that more and more women are having them, and having them younger than our male counterparts. Women ages 35-44 were most likely to be in crisis.
That’s right, you can have a midlife crisis in your 30s. Welcome to the modern world, where everything moves faster. Supposedly the pressure on working women is so intense, we burn out a decade before men do.
What is a mid-life crisis, anyway?
Cyberbullying leads to health risks
Cyberbullying has been at the root of a number of high profile suicides over the past year. As the bullying epidemic expands, doctors and therapists are seeing less headline-grabbing health consequences affecting both victims and bullies.
The health concerns are what you’d expect: depression, anxiety, and an elevated risk of suicide. What’s interesting is that they affect anyone involved in cyberbullying, either as a victim or an aggressor. Doctors are also starting to see cyberbullying as a health problem in it’s own right. As American Medical News reports:
“Like almost any disease, the earlier we recognize [cyberbullying] and treat it, almost without exception, the better the outcome will be,” said Henry J. Gault, MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Deerfield, Ill.
Mental health professionals are now encouraging primary care doctors to screen for cyberbullying risk factors during routine appointments.
Here’s a popular if disturbing statistic: From 1994-2002, the number of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder increased 40-fold.
If you want to read about how children can be behaviorally challenging you have lots of options online and in bookstores. But if you actually want to find a qualified pediatric mental health professional, and you don’t live in a big city, good luck. On the one hand, there aren’t enough qualified professionals to diagnose and treat complicated mental health issues in kids, on the other, lots of kids are getting scary diagnoses. Why is that? Continue reading »
Too much screen time is bad for kids' mental health.
Pediatrics has just published a study out of the University of Bristol in the U.K. that has proven more than two hours of screen time a day puts children “at an increased risk of psychological difficulties,” according to BBC News. Even more importantly, researchers found that extra exercise does not “make up” for too much screen time.
Naturally, children who spent more time “reading and doing homework had better psychological scores overall.” Hardly a surprise. But researchers say “children who did fewer than 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day were at an increased risk of psychological difficulties if they spent more than two hours using a computer or watching TV.” Continue reading »
Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldeman sat down for a talk with the Takeaway about Ayelet’s bipolar disorder, and how it affects their family life.
Chabon and Waldeman try to treat her mental illness like any illness: something the family deals with together, without shame or guilt.
Waldeman wasn’t diagnosed with bipolar disorder until after she became a mom. In the course of trying to figure out how to have a smooth, loving relationship as a family, they realized together as a couple that Ayelet wasn’t just “really moody.” She was sick, and could get treatment.
“The reason I get treatment is for my family,” Ayelet says.
On Friday, Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog re-printed the story of a mother torn about placing her 5-year-old son in a home for psychiatric patients. Her son, identified as E-Niner, suffers from “ADHD, pervasive developmental disorder, and psychosis,” and the strain of the decision is breaking her marriage in two. Her husband does not want their son to leave their home, yet everyone else in the family – including all four grandparents – feels E-Niner needs round-the-clock professional care.
If you’ve been divorced, you can probably relate to the sense of imminent disaster this mother feels. When a marriage is under heavy strain, it’s often impossible to deny the inevitability of a split. She asks, “Will my husband feel bullied into accepting the placement, and then decide to tear up our family afterward? Will I ultimately follow my husband’s desire not to place, squelching my own sense of what is absolutely right and necessary for E-Niner, and turn the tables on our marriage? Is the marriage dissolving right now, right before my very eyes?” Continue reading »
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Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
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Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
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Katherine Stone 
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