Social skills are an important part of life at every age, but childhood is where many of these abilities first begin to grow.

There’s nothing quite like a good mistake to remind us of our inadequacy! Mistakes can activate our emotional brain and makes us feel anxious and or depressed. A surge of negative emotions can arise after we make mistakes, which can result in behaviors that impair our functioning. Is there a way to make our relationship with mistakes/failures into healthy coping mechanisms rather than avoidance, maladaptive behaviors, and just suffering? What is your relationship with failur

When working with children who struggle to emotionally regulate, I notice that each of these children has one thing in common: There is someone in their circle who they view as a role model who also struggles to emotionally regulate.

Parents spend a great deal of time and money making elaborate plans for their children's summer vacations. Day camps, sleep away camps, enrichment classes, social skills groups... you name it. For many kids, every single day of summer is planned down to the last minute. For working parents, summers may present child care challenges and perhaps this is the driving force behind this growing trend of summer programming.

When a child is anxious, most adults instinctively move into problem-solving mode. The urge is to fix it, reduce it, or protect the child from the discomfort. That instinct makes sense, and it comes from care! At the same time, anxiety rarely responds well to being rushed or pushed away. In many cases, the more pressure there is to make it stop, the more it tends to hold on.