New Website, Courses and Presentations

Happy New Year! The launch of my new website has coincided with a new year which seems to be quite fitting. It is exciting to share some of the new changes to the website although the underlying purpose of making sense of kids has stayed the same.

What is new you say? I have created a resource area called Kid’s Best Bet, some new presentations, and am excited to be delivering a new course on emotions created by Gordon Neufeld. I invite you to have a look around and wish you all the best for 2015.

Kid’s Best Bet

Kid’s Best Bet is a virtual resource centre that will house articles and information on children and teens from a Neufeld, relational-developmental approach. The resources are tagged categorically making it easy to find topics of interest such as alpha children, separation anxiety, and discipline. Please feel free to share these resources with people who want to make sense of kids.

New Presentations

Every year I try to add new presentations based on questions, comments, as well as issues I commonly see in my counselling practice. The issue of peer orientation with the resulting loss of influence and direction over kids continues to be a pressing issue for so many parents and educators. In adolescence the stakes are high when kids follow their peer’s values over the directions of adults. The following presentation was created to address the phenomena of peer attachment and discuss both preventative strategies as well as how to reclaim a peer oriented child/teen.

Holding Onto Kids: Preserving Connection and Preventing Peer Orientation – Our children and teens are attaching to each other like never before with adult relationships taking a back seat to peer friendships. From a loss of influence in the home to the classroom, peer attached kids seek to be with their friends over parents and teachers. Adults were meant to guide a child or teen to maturity, peers are a poor replacement. The fallout from peer orientation includes behaviour and learning problems.  Strategies to reclaim a child will be discussed as well as how to prevent losing them to their peers.

The other presentation I created this year was to answer questions and concerns of parents and educators around the topic of school success. The stakes have never felt higher educationally in terms of preparing our children to succeed in a knowledge based, digital world. The response seems to be getting our kids to work harder but is this really the answer? Helping our children reach their full human potential means more than test scores and assessments, it also means social and emotional development. To address how the home front can best create the conditions conducive to school success I have developed the following presentation. I will be offering it through West Side Family Place on March 10th as a fundraiser, at the Neufeld Annual Conference on May 2nd, and adding it to the list of presentations that

Setting Kids up for Learning Success: The Role of Home – The teachability of a child is the single most important factor in learning success. The psychological determinants that govern a child’s capacity to learn are ideally fostered and cultivated in the home. What is the role of the parent in helping their child be ‘school ready’ and surviving the ‘ups and downs’ that come with it?  How do we measure success in a way that goes beyond test scores and academic assessments and focuses on the realization of human potential?  This presentation will tease apart the psychological determinants behind a child’s learning success and the role of parents in getting them there.

New Course

Gordon Neufeld recently filmed a five hour course on emotion – “What to do with children’s feelings? The science of emotion” in Montreal. The DVD will be released in the Spring of 2015 and I am happy to say I am the course coordinator for this one. We will be rolling out the online course for Faculty at the Neufeld Institute in May and will then offer the course online in the fall. Stay tuned for dates if you are interested. Until then, there are a few articles on emotional and social development in Kid’s Best Bet – Learning a Language of the Heart and The Emotional Lives of Young Children.