Secure Attachment

• Strong Parental Attachments
These bonds, or secure attachments, are formed through early parental care, such as picking up a child when he or she cries or holding and reassuring a child–– and are crucial to later success.

Pre-K is for Play

• Playing is Learning
What does a good education look like for 4-year-olds?

Black History, Bibles, Beatings

• Confusing Behavior Correction with Corporal Punishment
Some believers are fond of quoting Scriptures to justify corporal punishment, particularly the verse in Proverbs 13:24 that says, “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.” But in Hebrew, the word translated as rod is the same word used in Psalms 23:4, “thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” The shepherd’s rod was used to guide the sheep, not to beat them.

Spanking & Adrian Peterson

• Consequences for Child Development
Spanking can increase a child’s risk of aggression, antisocial behavior, and mental health disorderslater in life. It slows cognitive development and decreases language skills.

What's Known About Autism

• Children Who Beat Autism 
New research suggests that one in 10 autistic children sheds symptoms before adulthood.

Parenting Special Needs Children

• Training Parents

Six weeks of training in simple techniques led to significant reductions in stress, depression and anxiety among adults parenting a child with severe developmental disabilities.

Let Children Play

• The Advantages of Self-Directed, Unsupervised Play
Timothy Egan comments on the value of children exploring beyond the bounds of controlled play.

Silence Through Medication

• Difficult, Impulsive, Oppositional Behavior 
A child's "behavior is most often a communication about family, social, and economic stressors that are making a child's family less competent at caring for him....medication is just shutting off the child's efforts to tell me something, in effect silencing his voice."

• Claudia Gold

Quitodian *t*rauma

• Effects of Everyday (lowercase) trauma
Pediatrician Cynthia Gold discusses the developmental neuroscience behind this phenomenon.

Rasing Good Children

• Molding Morals in Children
If you want children to care about others, teach them to feel guilt rather than shame when they misbehave.

Suicide Prevention

• Talking About Surviving

Live Through This is a collection of portraits and stories of suicide attempt survivors, as told by those survivors.

Conversing With Infants and Toddlers

• Silence is Not Golden
Brain development is buoyed by continuous interaction with parents and caregivers from birth.

Self-Calming

• Rehabilitating After Early Trauma

Without appropriate adult support, childhood trauma can interfere with healthy brain development, inhibiting children’s ability to make good decisions, use memory or use sequential thought processes to work through problems.

Expand Pre-K, Not ADHD

• Forty Percent Increase in Ten Years
Researchers find the push for academic achievement and increased school accountability parallels skyrocketing A.D.H.D. diagnoses and medication.

Young Children & Divorce

• Little Children Big Challenges
Sesame Street provides tools to help young children through divorce.

Mental Health vs. Behavior Control

• Psychotropic Drugs & Children
Treating children with psychiatric drugs with no other form of treatment precludes understanding children living in poverty, especially those in foster care, and the significant contributing factors of early trauma and loss.

Wishing You a Bright & Happy 2014