Child Psychology

How Parents Can Handle Back-to-School Anxiety in Their Kids

Available for Interviews: Dr. Pete Loper

Dr. Pete Loper, MD, MSEd, FAAP, is a triple board-certified physician in pediatrics, psychiatry, and child psychiatry. He is also a professor and executive coach and is dedicated to mental health and wellness advocacy.

What Dr. Loper could say on
Back-to-School Anxiety:

- Not all anxiety is bad. It can be beneficial in supporting healthy adaptations for kids. It is typical and expected in times of change, but alternatively, some behaviors can be more concerning.
- There has been an increase in the number of patients needing mental health services since the pandemic. We have seen an uptick in the Adolescents age group.

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8 Family Solutions to Better Regulate Screen Time

Available for Interviews: Dr. Pete Loper

What Dr. Loper could say on
Screen Time Effects and Regulation:

Recommended Screen Time Duration for Most Age Groups, Including Adults

- The most consistent guidelines have been for children one year of age or younger, where the standard recommendation remains no screen time. Children between the ages of 2-4 according to the World Health Organization, or 2-5 according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, generally should have no more than one hour of screen time daily.
- The absence of consensus regarding screen time duration for older children and adults is due to a so-called lack of data. Particularly in the context of the pandemic, screens have become even more ubiquitous, making it that much harder to study this issue.
- However, consistent with our era of quantitative bias, where it’s not true unless you can prove it and big data is confounded with truth, the fear regarding screen time is that we are once again attempting to substitute data for common sense.

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8 Mental Health Activities to Best Support Kids and Teens

Available for Interviews: Dr. Pete Loper

What Dr. Loper could say on
Mental Health Support of Our Children:

- It is important to teach our children about mental health early in life because mental health is health. Human behavior is a manifestation of feelings and thoughts that then elicit specific actions and activities. The epidemic of chronic physical diseases that ail us as a society can be prevented, cured, or managed by lifestyle modification, or by simply changing our behaviors. Therefore, good mental health is a necessity for the consistent and sustained behaviors required for lifelong physical health and overall well-being.
- It’s often challenging to identify a child’s specific mental health needs. Unlike physical health needs, mental health needs are difficult to target because they are often invisible, and hidden inside the individual until disclosed through direct communication or maladaptive behaviors.

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Grades and Self-Esteem in School-Aged Children

Available for Interviews: Dr. Pete Loper

What Dr. Loper could say on
Grades and Self-Esteem:

Consistent with Carol Dweck’s research on “growth mindset,” struggle is a normal part of development. According to John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory, struggle in the context of the approach and exploration of new experiences is the rate-limiting step to healthy human development. Further, both Bowlby and his successor in Attachment research, Mary Ainsworth, identified the relationship between a child and their “experienced others” (parents, teachers) as the fundamental ingredient required to support continued approach and exploration in the context of struggle. Put simply, outcomes such as grades are a manifestation of the process, and your child’s willingness and motivation to engage in the process, i.e. to try, try again (growth mindset) is informed by a child’s interactions with parents and teachers.

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Debunking the Myth About What Causes Burnout

Available for Interviews: Dr. Pete Loper

What Dr. Loper could say on
Human Development & Burnout:

Whether you are getting into arguments with colleagues, taking 3-hour lunch breaks, regularly calling out sick, or quitting your job, burnout manifests as a series of avoidance, withdrawal, and acting-out behaviors. With this in mind, burnout is simply maldevelopment. If we understand burnout as maldevelopment, then by definition, we can understand that an insufficiency causes burnout in one of the 3 core ingredients required for healthy human development.

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What’s Your Parenting Style? Why It Matters.

Available for Interviews: Dr. Pete Loper

What Dr. Loper could say on the
4 General Parenting Styles and Why It Matters:

It’s very helpful for parents to know where they fall when it comes to parenting styles. Awareness can help parents carry out their parenting responsibilities more effectively and support healthy emotional growth in their children. How parents communicate, relate, and discipline has lasting effects and can influence their behavior not only through their childhoods but also throughout adulthood as well.

While we can separate parenting into four general styles, it’s important to note that parents rarely fall into one specific category. In general, parents may favor one style over the rest. There are generally four main parenting styles per the research:

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Talking to Our Children About School Violence

Available for Interviews: Dr. Pete Loper

What Dr. Loper could say on
How to Best Support Our Children’s Mental Health
When Tragic Current Events Unfold:

The horrific school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas has brought trauma and anxiety at once to a community that is now mourning the loss of 19 children and two teachers—and has brought collective trauma to our country as the conundrum concerning violence at our educational institutions rages on year after year.

Some ways that we can best support our children’s mental health and to help them process and cope with the often unpredictable and upsetting news events can fall into three categories:

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Supporting Our Children’s Emotional Intelligence & Empathy

Available for Interviews: Dr. Colleen Cira

Dr. Colleen Cira, PsyD, is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist as well as the Founder and Executive Director of the Cira Center for Behavioral Health. She is an anxiety and trauma expert as well as a consultant, supervisor, speaker, writer, and advocate.

What Dr. Colleen Cira can say in an interview about
Supporting Your Child’s EQ & Empathy:

Dr. Cira has worked with hundreds of people struggling to parent the way they’d ideally like to. There are several ways that you can increase your child’s emotional intelligence and empathy.

1. 1. 1. You must have empathy yourself. The most effective way that kids learn is by watching the way their parents behave. If YOU, the parent, have and demonstrate empathy, your children will grow up to be empathic. Give money to homeless folks, check in on friends, family, and neighbors who are ill and/or struggling, take your child to a peaceful, family-friendly protest, volunteer at a food bank together. SHOW UP the way you’d like your child to show up someday.
    2. You must accept your child’s emotions. This sounds easy but is not. It’s hard to see our children hurting—we’re actually biologically programmed to struggle to tolerate it. We want to make it better for them if they are sad. We want to make it go away if they are angry. But in order for our kids to learn how to accept other people’s feelings as they are, we have to teach them how to accept THEIR OWN feelings and the only way to do that is when WE accept their feelings. Let your kids experience big feelings without fixing or punishing.
    3. When your kid has an absolute meltdown about something, once they’re calm, talk it through with them. When your child is freaking out about something big or small, that is NOT the time to try to reason with them. Validate their feelings at the moment (that does NOT mean give them whatever they want), help and/or let them calm down, and then ask them to talk through everything that happened, just like they’re telling a story. Have them tell you the beginning, middle, and end and what they learned from it. See our children’s brains are not fully developed and won’t be for a long time (think mid-20’s – GASP!) which includes the connectivity between the two hemispheres. When you help tie a child’s emotional response to a rational (and verbal) response, you help them develop their brain in a way that honors their emotions but also increases their rationality.
    4. Talk about feelings. Your kid doesn’t show up in the world knowing when they are sad, scared, angry, or worried. YOU have to teach them that. The only way to have empathy—an understanding and acceptance of another’s feelings—is by having an understanding and acceptance of your own feelings. This means you need to know what the heck you’re feeling! There are subtle differences between sadness and grief. Anger and frustration. Anxiety and fear. Help your child start to learn those things and tease them apart by labeling and talking about feelings. Share your own feelings. Take a guess at what they’re feeling and believe them when they say it’s not that. When you read books or watch movies together, encourage them to speculate on how the characters are feeling or what they are thinking. All of these things encourage 1) feeling identification and 2) perspective taking both of which are required for empathy.

Interviews: Dr. Colleen Cira

Dr. Colleen Cira, PsyD, received both her Masters and Doctorate from The Illinois School of Professional Psychology and is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in the State of Illinois. She’s the Founder and Executive Director of Cira Center for Behavioral Health, PC, a boutique group practice specializing in Women and Trauma with locations in Chicago and Oak Park.

She was named one of the “Top 100 Women in Chicago Making a Difference,” by Today’s Chicago Woman. Dr. Cira is a trauma and anxiety expert, clinical supervisor, writer, speaker, consultant, activist, wife, and Mommy to two little ones.

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