Seeing your child anxious can be one of the hardest things as a parent. It is hard because none of us like to see our children in pain, and we often don’t know the best way to respond or help. In our last blog post, we discussed ways to teach your child to talk back to anxiety. If you didn’t have a chance to read the blog, check it out here.

Now, we are going to be diving deeper into arguably one of the best ways to help your child minimize anxiety, which is something we call exposure. Exposure simply means taking steps to intentionally do the things your child fears. Remember what we learned in the last blog — Anxiety grows bigger through avoidance. Thus, the primary way for your child to learn that their fears don’t come true is by putting themselves in the feared situation, so they can learn through experience. No more avoidance! And in that process, sometimes your child’s fears do actually come true. However, what children often learn is that it wasn’t as bad as they thought, and ...

Years ago, I worked with a little boy who was terrified to separate from his mother. Even in their home, his mother could not go into another room (not even the bathroom!) to be by herself. Her son was extremely fearful, and she was beyond exhausted by it. After the first session with me, the little boy refused to come back to see me. He didn’t like me, and I had offended him in some way. The mother asked for referrals to another therapist, but I told her to try and give it a shot a little longer. I explained that sometimes children avoid going to therapy because it causes them anxiety to come and talk about their anxiety. The mother agreed, and we continued.

The second meeting, we named his worry and talked about what his worries were telling him. After several questions, he began telling me that his worries told him that while he was in the office with me, his mother would leave and never come back. We then used a worry thermometer to identify how worried he was that this would happ...

Your child is having difficulty focusing and seems constantly distracted by the smallest things. Homework and morning routines take hours to complete. Your child is rarely able to stay seated at dinner or at a desk, interrupts constantly, blurts out funny comments at the most inconvenient times, and climbs literally everything in sight. After years of concerns from yourself and teachers, you finally make the decision to seek out an evaluation and treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, after a quick google search in your area for specialists who diagnose and treat ADHD, it becomes clear that there are too many options. Hello, overwhelm and confusion! In this blog post, I am going to provide you with a little information on ADHD, why a comprehensive evaluation is important, and advantages/drawbacks of various specialists who diagnose and treat ADHD.

What is ADHD?

Before I get into answering the question of which specialist to choose, let’s first disc...