The prickly kids have always been my favourite. You know, the defiant, argumentative ones. I’ve always had a special place in my heart for them, and now I’m parenting one. At the age of 6 my son was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder, ADHD, Anxiety, and Depression. At the age of 8 he was suicidal. […]
I got a phone call from my 13 year old son’s school telling me he had left the building. That’s right, just up and left school and now they didn’t know where he was. He had never done this before so I honestly didn’t know what to say. After moments of silence, the Vice Principal […]
How do you know when it’s time to push your kids through hard stuff and when it’s time to bring them close to shelter them? When do you “rescue” your kid and when do you let them venture out to learn on their own? Great question. There’s no easy answer. My parenting has been a […]
When we lack boundaries, our lives feel chaotic and out of control. This builds up inside of us overtime causing great distress often revealing itself as disregulation, which I define as “going bazzerk”. Who usually gets the brunt of all of it? You guessed it, our family or those closest to us. When we don’t […]
I read a staggering study from Unicef that stated Canada is number 25 in the world for child psychological and physical safety. What does this look like? 55% of children and youth who visit the hospital do so due to mental health related reasons. Which really means they’ve contemplated suicide. 55%! That’s more than broken […]
Last night my son had an anxiety attack like we hadn’t seen in years. Anxiety for my son shows up as anger and aggression. Patterns of yelling profanities, pushing me away, spitting on me, threatening to hurt himself and us, to crying desperately. Before these emotions would hurl me into my own disregulation only escalating […]
Anxiety has gone through the roof in the last 10 years with our young ones. Many wonder why their child is struggling and come to my seminars with great concern as well as confusion. We want something to blame. I’ve noticed our favourite thing to blame it on is screens, but after observing, studying, and […]
This week I had the opportunity to sit down with one of my mentors, Derek Cook, from the Poverty Institute at Ambrose University. He has deeply impacted my resilience work and has connected the dots between poverty and mental health. The following article was taken from an interview I did with Derek. These are his […]
I took a deep breath and picked up the phone. I held my breath when someone on the other end of Bell Let’s Talk answered the phone. I had a dream in my heart to do a conference on Bell Let’s Talk Day and I wanted their support. It blew me away when they said, […]
I am offering a challenge to families to make this Christmas different than any other we’ve experienced. What do we normally do on Christmas? We gather with family, we eat (and eat, and eat), we have more presents than we know what to do with. Some don’t have this, which is unfortunate and we need […]
