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Seeing the Unseen, Listening to the Unheard: Unsilencing Sexually Traumatized Children’s Voices in Play Therapy
By Jodi Ann Mullen, PhD LMHC RPT-S Dumbledore to Harry Potter, “A child’s voice, however honest and true, is meaningless to those who’ve forgotten to listen.” As child mental health professionals these words resonate deeply, urging us to evaluate how we hear the voices of children, particularly those who have been silenced by sexual abuse…
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How Challenging is Parenting Adolescents in the 21st century?
By Mark Amendola, M.S., L.C.S.W. Developmental needs of adolescents have primarily remained the same over time. What has changed is our culture, social environment, technological, and economic conditions. The search for identity, autonomy, and the need for social connections remain fundamental across time. Parenting teens can certainly vary based on individual circumstances. There are various…
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Growin’ Them Brains!
By Scott I. Goldsmith, M.S., LPC I want to talk about three concepts and what they mean for those of us helping kids grow their brains! While most people know that children’s brains are rapidly developing throughout childhood, many people are not aware that their brains also shrink a few times during their youth. While…
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Kids and Teens Need Resilience: They can learn it—and we can help
By Mary Alvord, Ph.D The following article is reproduced here with permission granted by the Pew Charitable Trust. This article appears in Trend Magazine as a Trend Article dated December 8, 2023. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2023/kids-and-teens-need-resilience A few decades ago, I met a 6-year-old girl from Russia. For her privacy, I’ll call her K. I saw many…
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The State of SEL Now: Essential
By Maurice J. Elias, PhD Rutgers University, Academy for Social-Emotional Learning in Schools (SELinSchools.org) The social and emotional development of young people has been a concern of families, educators, and society at large since people first appeared on the earth; Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is not new at all. It is a term that captures essential…
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It’s Obvious: SEL and Character Ed are Good for Everyone
By Paul Cicchini, Ed.S, NCSP When I embarked on my Character Education crusade over ten years ago, I never thought America would be where it is now. At that time in my career as a psychologist and educator, I looked around my schools and concluded that we had lost something. Students were not empathetic to…
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Game-Based Learning
By Jaime Dombrowski, PhD A fairly new concept that has been receiving a lot of traction in recent years is game-based learning—when content is learned in an interactive manner that engages students. Perrotta et al. (2013) postulated that game-based learning increases motivation, performance, and engagement. Game-based learning allows students to interact with one another and…
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A Time for Renewal
By Dale G. Larson The COVID pandemic precipitated a tsunami of grief and loss that sent psychological, social, and health shock waves surging through societies across the world. Americans, particularly, experienced skyrocketing levels of anxiety, depression, uncertainty, loneliness, and more than one million pandemic-related deaths.1,2 Compounding this trauma in America are several other events that…
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