As a therapist I regularly visit and observe children at preschools. By and large, I am encouraged by teachers’ efforts to educate and care for their young students. Of course, I sometimes also see environments where young children are not thriving in the way that parents would hope.

What makes the difference?

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I’m not too big on reading blogs (Oh, the irony!). I get most of my learning from books or face-to-face experiences. But I recently happened upon a cool blog post that spoke to an idea I use with families all the time. It’s called Hanlon’s Razor, and while it may sound like an unpublished poem about an ambivalent, bearded man, it’s actually much less random and much more useful than that.

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Without a doubt there are some people who are born geniuses. Mozart, for example, was reported to have published his first musical composition when he was only 5. Similar examples in math, science, and language abound. One thing that child prodigies have in common is that their abilities are easy to prove.

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It’s amazing how early in life kids want their parents to mind their own business. Many parents of older children and teens lament how difficult it is to get their kids to talk about their lives and answer basic questions like, “How was your day?” But I have seen children as young as 3 in the habit of answering “Fine” and implicitly shutting down further discussion.

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Everyone wants their children to develop emotionally so that they are prepared to endure and overcome life’s inevitable trials, but sometimes parents’ actions hinder the fulfillment of that very wish. We explored one of the likely sources of this contradiction in a recent post on the repetition compulsion. Today we’ll look at three common steps that parents unwittingly take to squash their little kids’ emotional intelligence.

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This one is for the parents who want to dive a little deeper and read about the research that shapes The Good Enough approach. Without further adieu, let me introduce one of my favorite researchers in the field of early childhood, Beatrice Beebe. Probably her biggest contribution has been her work in attachment and video microanalysis.

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A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to attend a training with Arietta Slade. For those of you who have never heard of her, Slade is an all-star of early childhood mental health. At one point when she was taking questions, someone in the audience asked her for one piece of advice she would give to parents of young children. Her answer: “Repair.”

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Aggression gets a bad wrap. Among civilized adults, it’s one of those words that readily elicits discomfort or even condemnation, something you’re not supposed to feel, much less express, save for a few areas (e.g., competition, self-defense, war, etc.). This apparent truism seems even truer when we talk about aggression directed towards children.

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