Dr. Shanker’s latest article for Psychology Today explains how to talk to a teen when he’s “gone limbic.” “All too often, we misinterpret what a teen is “saying” because of mindblindness: i.e., we fail to recognize which state the child is in. The truth is...
“You have to be calm in order to enjoy being calm. If we’re over-stressed going into the holidays we’re likely to be over-stressed coming out.” In this article, Dr. Shanker discusses the reasons why the winter holidays are often more stressful than they are...
Lying is the quintessential example of misbehaviour, but confabulating is a stress behaviour. The big challenge in helping a child develop truthfulness is recognizing which is which, and knowing how best to respond when we’re dealing with...
Self-Reg worries just as much about describing an infant as “difficult” as describing an older child as “bad.” The point is that an infant’s “difficult” behaviours need to be reframed every bit as much as what gets mistakenly labelled as “misbehaviour” in a child or...
Like everyone else in Canada, I was mesmerized by Penny Oleksiak’s performance at the 2016 Olympics. Oleksiak had already proven that she was a force to be reckoned with at last year’s World Juniors. She was incredible in the 100m butterfly, but what she did in the...
The great paradox of a stress cycle is that the harder you try to escape the tighter is its grip. Yet simply trying to relax and look dispassionately at one’s emotional distress is no more effective. Stuart Shanker’s blog post for Psychology Today describes how we can...
We may not be the most stressed generation ever but we are certainly the generation that talks the most about how stressed we are. We are constantly bombarded with messages that play on this theme: “You need to take a holiday,” “Pamper yourself,” “Buy this miracle...
I’ve had several defining moments over the course of my career, but nothing quite as powerful as what has transpired with our Foundations Courses. Our initial planning was conservative. We were anticipating a small number of participants to begin with, and, if...
The degus, which live in central Chile, are an incredibly interesting species. Like prairie voles they are highly social, using digging chains to construct elaborate burrows. They have a broad repertoire of communicative vocalizations and complex foraging behaviours....
There is a profound difference between self-regulation and self-control. Self-control is about inhibiting strong impulses; self-regulation, reducing the frequency and intensity of strong impulses by managing stress-load and recovery. In fact,...
The mom on the phone was distraught. Her son had been through a harrowing experience at his previous school, which ended up with him “agreeing” to leave after a couple of incidents of threatening behaviour and a psychological assessment that diagnosed him as being at...
Kids today are under way too much stress. Pretty much all kids, all ages. We know this because we’re seeing more and more children and youth with stress-related conditions: e.g., problems in health, allergies, behaviour, mood, attention,...
I had just finished a long morning session and was stopped on my way out by a woman in obvious distress. She told me her 8-year-old son had just been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and she didn’t know what to do. Would Self-Reg help him? Would...
“What,” Susan asked me, “do you mean when you talk about schools becoming ‘Self-Reg Havens’ and why is this so important?” My immediate reaction was: Ask me an easy one why don’t you! But the fact is, our experience over the past few years has shown us that this may...
Shortly after the Liberals won the election, Prime Minister Trudeau gave a speech at Canada House in London in which he argued passionately that: “We have a responsibility — to ourselves and to the world — to show that inclusive diversity is a strength and a force...
Over the past few years, a number of articles have appeared warning about the serious decline in student resilience. Not just what Robin Wilson calls an “epidemic of anguish” [Wilson], but what Peter Gray describes as a remarkably limited ability to deal with even...
I don’t want to write a blog about statistics. We all know that the obesity problem in children is very serious and that the number of obese youth is positively alarming. I want to talk instead about the suffering that is so often caused by the Self-Control paradigm,...
In our very first webinar in the ‘Epidemic of Epidemics’ series we looked at the “anxiety epidemic”; today I want to look at the opposite end of this spectrum, the epidemic of “manic” children and youth. Kids who are chronically hyper, driven to find ways to fuel...