Substance Use In Adolescents

I recently had the chance to chat with and listen to a seminar delivered by Dean Nicholson around substance use and sexual abuse.  Nicholson is the administrator of East Kootenay Addiction Services in Cranbrook BC. He recently conducted award winning research surrounding substance use and sexual abuse in youth.

Before diving too deep into his results, it is important to outline that drug and alcohol use occur on a spectrum. To start, there are none users. Next isexperimental users, this is 1-3 uses of a particular substance. Moving along there is social/recreational users. This means that usage occurs less than once a week, and the reasons for using are for socializing with peers. These levels are completely normal for adolescents to use. It should be noted that in these categories use typically occurs on weekends.

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Read the rest at Notes on Parenting.

Establishing Trust With Your Infant

According to Barbara and Philip Newman infants (birth to two years old) experience the psychsocial crisis of Trust vs Mistrust. A psychosocial crisis is a predictable life tension during a certain stage in life. Psychosical in this sense draws to the point that the crisis is due to societal and cultural influences as well as psychological. Crisis in this sense refers to a normal stressor instead of an extraordinary event.

It is a crisis, in that an infant will either develop trust like attributes or will develop attributes of mistrust. It is amazing that it is at this young age that this is when trust is first developed.

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Read the rest at Notes on Parenting

Eliminating the Poor-bashing around us

It was about five years ago that the CBC reported that forty percent of the world’s wealth was owned by one percent of the world’s population.  There has been an ever increasing gap between the wealthy, and the common-day worker, as the occupy movement so overtly showed.  It has been claimed that the wealthiest in North America are so out of touch that they needed to go undercover and perform work expectation tasks (that they usually cannot complete in adequate time) in a reality show called “Undercover Boss”.  This show is meant to encourage the boss to feel sympathy for the lowly worker.  However, Jean Swanson, an anti-poverty activist, would argue that this is a form of poor-bashing.

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Read the rest at Notes on Parenting.

War On Boys, Part 2

From AMCAP & Deseret News

In the middle of a crowd of kids waiting for the bus in front of a westside middle school, one of the girls drops her book bag and two boys scramble to grab it, nearly bumping heads. She's 14 going on 17, all makeup-enhanced eyes and curled hair and dazzling smile. The boys are more like 14 going on 12, gangly and haphazardly dressed — and eager to get her attention.

They are the prize in the war on boys.
Read the full article at Deseret News.

War On Boys, Part 1

From AMCAP & Deseret News:

This is Jared just days before his 15th birthday: He has mostly B's and C's on his report card, but the lone F is a parent-enraging reminder that math's not his thing. He doesn't get it and he's not receiving a lot of help. He likes basketball, video games and a girl named Libby, because she's "hot," though he can't tell you much about her or how she feels about things, including him. At school he is alternately bored and lost. He'd rather play God of War than study and it was that video game his parents used as a reward to get him to bring up his grades last semester, though he couldn't get the math mark to budge.

In eighth grade, he figured he'd go to college. By ninth grade, he was leaning more toward a technical school. And midway through 10th grade in his northern Utah high school, he shrugs and says he doesn't know. Maybe he'll get a job or join the military.

Read the full article at Deseret News.

Divorce Enablers

From AMCAP & Psychology Today.

You thought therapy would save your marriage? And all you got was divorce? Well, feel free to blame your therapist. That's because, for a long time, most therapists have been soft on divorce.

Few fields have played a bigger role in the evolution of America's mental health care system than couples therapists. These days, roughly one million American couples a year seek counselling to save their marriages or relationships. Many also attend pre-marital counselling.
Read the full article at Psychology Today.

Births Outside Marriage

The Association for Mormon Counselors & Psychotherapists, usually a dormant membership (except around conference season), has been rather active in sharing news sources around the morphing society.  This is the first in a few articles they have posted on their site that I would like to share.

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It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.
Read the full article at the New York Times website.