Webinar: Cultivating Healthy Habits

 Meeting Link: https://bit.ly/3nAisld

Ready to go! Parenting skills for the start of the school year.

 Parents want the best for their children when they start school. In this webinar, Therese will share parenting strategies which will help children develop important independence skills for a happy and productive school year.

Therese will talk about how parents can encourage age-appropriate social skills and independence, create healthy routines to use at home and on school days & she will share how parents can problem solve with their children.

Join Therese on Monday, September 27th at 8pm.

This webinar is free of charge. Please feel free to pass along to fellow parents who can benefit from this talk.

Register here

Back to School - Online Safety Tips

 

Some kids prefer remote learning. Why in-person is better, and how to help them transition.

Jonathan was an avid soccer player, a dedicated student and a social young man who enjoyed spending time with his friends. However, by the time he limped into our clinic after a year of chronic knee pain, he was not attending school, was withdrawn from his peers, had retreated to his room and was worried about the unpredictability of his future.

As psychologists at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Mayo Family Pediatric Pain Rehabilitation Center, we work with youths who have severe and debilitating chronic pain. Kids and teens who enroll in our program typically have withdrawn from everyday activities to reduce or avoid worsening their pain. We have dubbed this coping approach “comfortably uncomfortable.” Counterintuitively, returning to daily life while coping with pain is an essential step toward reaching the ultimate treatment goal: pain relief.

We see a parallel between our patients’ experiences and what many schoolchildren and their families have faced during the pandemic: Remote learning provided many kids relief from struggles such as academic pressure, emotional angst and social stress. Now, they or their parents may be resisting a return to “normal,” because they have become comfortable with this unconventional form of schooling.

We worry that this problem will become pervasive as the school year starts — that families will make the comfortably uncomfortable choice of sticking with remote learning to avoid confronting other problems. Some schools are returning to full-time in-person classes, but others are planning hybrid models, with both in-person and online learning. Although safety concerns or other circumstances may make a hybrid model or online-only schooling appropriate for some families, a knee-jerk choice to go remote can create a slippery slope of avoidance of what may have caused distress before the pandemic.

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