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Strollerderby
She’s the TV mom everyone loves to hate. Kate Gosselin returns to the tube with her children in tow in her new series, Kate Plus 8, airing this Sunday, June 6 at 9pm on TLC.
David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun says she won’t be doing so without a new level of scrutiny from lawmakers and mental health experts. He reports that “psychiatrists and child advocates say the shows can invade a child’s privacy and confuse a child’s sense of identity.”
Zurawik quotes Dr. Michael Brody, chairman of the Television and Media Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (who knew there was such a thing?) as saying, “Kids in these kinds of shows are not having a childhood, and you don’t have to be a scientist to know what’s going to happen to some of them as they get older. It can be a real disaster for them.” He continues, “Just doing retakes, where they stage a scene and then reshoot it again because something went wrong, really screws up a kid’s sense of reality.”
Anyone who has been privy to the reality of “reality” TV will tell you that it is definitely not for the faint of heart. A talented and experienced friend who was recently on the set of a popular summer reality show left feeling that reality TV is “evil and not to be trusted.” Certainly by agreeing to appear on a reality show, you have to surrender to the fact that what happens in the editing room is out of your hands; you have to be okay with however you end up being portrayed in the final cut. The problem with the Gosselin kids is, they’re not old enough to understand any of that, nor to make their own decisions. Continue reading »
May is Mental Health Month and a good time to talk about a subject that many parents are unaware even exists: depression in preschoolers.
The National Mental Health Information Center estimates that as many as one in five children and adolescents may have a mental health disorder, including chronic depression. But according to experts, even children as young as three can suffer the debilitating effects of this disorder. And the signs are not always easy to recognize. Continue reading »
Happy National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day! Okay, maybe it’s not a reason to celebrate, but it is a good opportunity to educate yourself about mental health issues in kids.
As someone who has suffered from depression, I know how important it is to have family support and professional treatment. Unfortunately, with so many misconceptions about mental illness in children, some kids are not getting the help they need.
The National Mental Health Information Center estimates that as many as one in five children and adolescents may have a mental health disorder that can be identified and require treatment. Another study found that 13 percent of children ages 8 to 15 had at least one mental disorder, a rate that is comparable to diabetes, asthma, and other childhood diseases.
Continue reading »
Psychoanalyst and author Alice Miller has died, leaving behind a world changed by her work. Our awareness of child abuse and our constant mommy guilt have both been shaped by her ideas.
Miller’s first book, “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” was published in 1981, the year I started preschool. In it, she put forth the dramatic thesis that all children are irrevocably scarred by their parents, and spend their lives working through the damage done in early childhood.
Awesome. Thanks, Dr. Miller. I guess I have you to thank for the moments when I feel like a worthless failure for forgetting to pack spare socks in my diaper bag. Continue reading »
What did kid’s do about their problems back in the day? Only a few generations ago, there was no booming childhood psychiatry industry. Child therapists didn’t have offices in every neighborhood, and medications to treat mental health issues were unheard of.
How did those kids cope?
It’s an obvious question, in a world cluttered with headlines about childhood problems ranging from ADHD to depression to the newly proposed “temper disregulation with dysphoria”, which appears to be a fancy name for pathological temper tantrums.
In this week’s New York Times, therapist and writer Erik Kolbell attempts an answer.
A common phrase around our house is,”Yeah, well, it’ll be something for them to tell their therapist.” My husband is a actual therapist,so I think he knows whereof he speaks.
So does Paula Bloom, presumably. She posted a story this week titled “What Can You Do to Lower Your Kids’ Future Therapy Bills?” I clicked over, thinking this was tongue in cheek. And it was…but still came off as pretty guilt-mongering for parents. While she jokingly lists which screwups might levy the heftiest bills Continue reading »
According to a comprehensive survey recently released by the Department of Defense, the number of military families seeking mental health services for their kids has sharply increased since the start of the war in Iraq. Last year, children with one or more parents in the military sought outpatient mental health care 2 million times, double the number since the beginning of the Iraq War. And the number of children hospitalized for psychiatric problems has increased by 20 percent from 2007 to 2008. Continue reading »
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