Tag: mental health

parenting, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Socially Prescribed Perfectionism

Wendy Winograd

As a parent, have you ever felt torn between feeling that you should push your kids toward higher levels of achievement, so that they can be successful in today’s world and feeling worried and concerned about the stress and anxiety that they are experiencing?  According to Peter Gray, Boston College psychology professor, many parents do. In his Substack blog, Play Makes Us Human, Gray discusses socially prescribed perfectionism, a kind of perfectionism that is marked by a concern about what others think. Gray argues that the primary issue in socially prescribed perfectionism is the concern that others will think you … Continue reading Socially Prescribed Perfectionism

parenting, play and mental health, play spaces, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Stepping Back From Intensive Parenting

Wendy Winograd

I have written in this column before about my concerns about the decline children’s opportunities for independent play. A September 2023 article published in the Journal of Pediatrics reviews research that indicates that in addition to those possible causes of the increase in childhood anxiety and depression is another significant factor: the decline in independent play.  They state, Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults Here is … Continue reading Stepping Back From Intensive Parenting

emotional regulation, parenting, reviewsLeave a comment

What do you know about Marc Brackett’s Permission to Feel?

Wendy Winograd

In his book, Permission to Feel,” Marc Brackett, Founding Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, argues for the importance of privileging, understanding, and utilizing our emotions. He shows how regulating our emotions hinges on our ability to identify and name them and have them honored and understood by others. And he argues that our success in life is much more influenced by our ability to tolerate and manage all of our emotions than it is on our intelligence or knowledge. Indeed, if we are not well-regulated emotionally, our ability to capitalize on our skills and knowledge will be … Continue reading What do you know about Marc Brackett’s Permission to Feel?

parenting, play and mental health, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Decision-Making in a Pandemic

Wendy Winograd

Decision-making in the time of COVID can be, for many of us, overwhelming. Things we never had to consider before are now areas of concern. Should we go to a Broadway play or museum? Should we attend a sporting event indoors? Should we go to that concert, where people will sit shoulder to shoulder, even though it is outside? When it comes to children too young to be vaccinated, the calculus becomes even more complicated. It is clear that children need contact outside the family. In infancy and early childhood, they benefit greatly from contact with grandparents aunts, uncles, cousins. … Continue reading Decision-Making in a Pandemic

parenting, play and mental health, play spaces, play therapy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

5 Things to Do Under Quarantine

Wendy Winograd

As a result of the quarantine, new studies are starting to come out showing that being online all day can affect your health, make you anxious, give you headaches, affect your vision, and affect your sleep. Long before we were sheltering in place, Melissa Pandika in “The Unexpected Effects of all that Screen Time,” reported on symptoms shown by children, tweens, teens and adults as a result of too much screen time.  Although the internet can allow for community building and connection, Pandika, quoting Delaney Ruston, a physician and documentary filmmaker who produced Screenagers, warns that social development can be … Continue reading 5 Things to Do Under Quarantine

parenting, play and mental health, UncategorizedLeave a comment

For Parents During COVID-19

Wendy Winograd

I want to say a few things about the effects of trauma and what you can do to help yourselves and your children through this difficult time. Children take their cues from parents, so it is vitally important that you take care of yourselves so that you can be optimally available, emotionally, to your children. In a Youtube video addressing COVID-19, Bessel van der Kolk, trauma expert and author of the book The Body Keeps the Score, says, Being in a situation where you cannot do what you always do, where you are basically rendered helpless, that’s the definition of … Continue reading For Parents During COVID-19

play and mental health, play therapy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Review of “A Four-and-a-Half Year Old Boy Who Had Dropped Out of the World – The Most Amazing Analytic Experience I Have Ever Had” Presented by Dr. Martin Silverman

Wendy Winograd

In the first phase of treatment, all of our patients interview us. They are checking to be sure that we will be helpful and not harmful. Patience, the willingness to wait, and curiosity about what is growing beneath the surface of things are, perhaps, two of a psychoanalyst’s most important tools. In intensive psychotherapeutic treatment the analyst needs the capacity to not know, to contain the feeling of not knowing, and to allow the mind to drift and wander. It’s all there in the memory banks, but to be effective in finding it, the analyst must be comfortable living with … Continue reading Review of “A Four-and-a-Half Year Old Boy Who Had Dropped Out of the World – The Most Amazing Analytic Experience I Have Ever Had” Presented by Dr. Martin Silverman

parenting, play therapy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mindreading and Mindblindness

Wendy Winograd

Mentalization is the uniquely human (or so we think) ability to know one’s own mind and also the minds of others. The ability to mentalize develops in early childhood, consolidating at around 5 to 7 years old. It is the faculty of mind that allows us to understand that we have intentions, wishes, desires, feelings, hopes, knowledge, and plans, that others do as well. Moreover, once we have achieved mentalization, we also know that minds are opaque; in other words, we can guess what’s in someone else’s mind, but we can’t know it for sure unless we ask. The theory of … Continue reading Mindreading and Mindblindness