Working directly with parents can be either terribly frustrating or exceptionally gratifying. Many counselors initially feel both fear and frustration at the prospect of counseling parents. That was certainly the case for me. I not only felt intimidated, but I also held several negative beliefs about parents that adversely affected
Tag: Family
Kara Carnes-Holt’s daughter had one wish on her fifth birthday. “I wish that this mommy and daddy keep me forever,” the little girl said as she blew out the candles on her cake. Hearing her wish, Carnes-Holt and her husband assured their daughter they were going to keep her forever.
Laura Hoskins, who runs a private practice in Brattleboro, Vt. and specializes in adopted children and their families, offers some recommended reading for counselors working with adopted and foster children: For clinicians and parents: Creating Capacity for Attachment by A. Becker-Weidman Twenty Things Adopted Children Wish Their Parents Knew by Sherrie Eldridge
Counselors are good at relationships, or so they say. As folklore would have it, counselors are the “knowers” of all things relational and, therefore, can and should be “masters” when it comes to their own personal relationships. But is this really the case? As a counselor, I thought I was
A new policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics has declared that children who are exposed to “toxic stress” between conception and early childhood could have lifelong problems. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports: “Toxic stress might arise from parental abuse of alcohol or drugs. It could
You might have had a friend joke that they suffer from “middle-child syndrome,” but scientists are discovering that a person’s siblings might affect their personality even more than their parents do. Whether you have a brother or sister as well as your birth order can dramatically impact whether you will
A Columbus, Ohio, mother and her two children are stabbed to death. A mother and grandmother is beaten and shot to death in Newark, Ohio. A Logan, Ohio, mother with three children under the age of 6 is kidnapped and strangled; her body is dumped in a sewer. The commonalities? Each of
A simple e-mail makes all the hard work worthwhile for Susan Branco Alvarado. “I may not show it all the time,” an adopted teenage client wrote to Alvarado, “but I really appreciate everything you have done for me. Thanks to you, my relationship with my mom has gotten a thousand
It was 25 years ago when Bette Stewart’s husband was diagnosed with a mental illness. “I felt angry and alone, like my life was coming apart at the seams,” she recalls. “I asked the psychiatrist for help. I know now that if (my husband) was an alcoholic, I would have
Society has long recognized the positive impact that a sturdy adult relationship can have not only on the individuals who have united to form a couple but on the emotional health of those in the couple’s sphere of influence. These relationships help define us and, some say, strengthen our society.