Kids & Teens

To work as a school social worker in the Bronx’s high-crime, low-income Hunt’s Point neighborhood is to become an expert at expecting the unexpected. Read more

Daniel Hughes has many techniques to suggest when working with troubled children who have put up a wall. Read more

With his son’s freedom hanging in the balance, a father must decide whether to give the gift of forgiveness one more time. Read more

In an encyclopedic new book, Andrew Solomon explores how parents and children forge emotional bonds with one another in the presence of sometimes vast inborn... Read more

Kenneth Hardy believes that the experience of trauma is too often unacknowledged by therapists struggling to help troubled minority youth. Read more

In this age of helicopter parents and protective child professionals, we can often recreate a potent anxiety- reinforcing system around children that not only... Read more

The word psychopath distinguishes hard-bitten predators. Research shows a treatment center—run by shrinks, not wardens—has reduced new violent offenses by... Read more

Few cases offer as eerie a therapeutic challenge as a suddenly noncommunicative child, lost in a dissociative shutdown. Read more

It’s probably fair to say that most teens loathe the very idea of therapy. Yet, with confused and troubled adolescents needing our help more than ever, the... Read more

While some believe the incidence of school bullying has reached epidemic proportions, therapists remain largely uninformed about the nature of the problem and... Read more

The old compact between family and society—each doing its part to protect and promote the whole—seems to be badly strained, if not flat-out broken. Thus... Read more

Our growing understanding of attachment and the processes that shape the parenting brain are opening new possibilities for helping stressed-out parents who are... Read more

An understanding of the unconventional ways people demonstrate resilience is important in helping us avoid pathologizing clients and stop believing there’s... Read more

It’s not necessarily that sadness must always be avoided, but maybe we need to find a way to give it its place. Read more

A mother deals with the news that her child will have a lifelong impairment. Read more

While it's common knowledge that childhood trauma can have far-reaching consequences for adult mental health, its impact on adult physical health is less... Read more

Turning problems to be diagnosed and medication into skills to be taught. Read more

When a child is diagnosed with an autism disorder, everything in a family changes. Good-enough parenting must give way to the demands of uber-parenting: always... Read more

The controversy over whether the ever-expanding number of recommended vaccines is putting children at risk for autism. Read more

Constant Uncertainty about who's a friend and who's a foe, the mundane chaos of the classroom, rules that always seem to be changing—an ordinary day at... Read more

In our culture, we don't take kindly to children who won't do as they are told. Now a new treatment approach offers hope for kids who defy standard diagnoses. Read more

For decades before and after World War II, children all over the United States hung out, had slumber parties, made crank phone calls, and played sports... Read more

The consolation prize for boys who feel deeply but can't express or even decipher their own emotions is the universe of "electronica," a womb of... Read more

Helping kids with ODD begins with getting past the many myths surrounding the disorder. Read more

The child therapist approaches the child who can't play by introducing play activities one step at the time. Read more

Therapists helping children confront OCD face a formidable obstacle: helping their young clients get beyond their immediate terror in the hope of reaping... Read more

Clinical diagnoses can have more to do with politics and economics than with science and effective treatment. Read more

The tragic confrontation at Waco, Texas, in 1993 taught us much about what to do to help traumatized children, and perhaps even more about what not to do. Read more

Facing the challenge of working with a dissembling adolescent in a blended family means changing the "official story" of the problem. Read more

A professor skeptical of the clinical value of family therapy may be doing more to extend the legacy of systems therapy than anyone working with adolescents... Read more