Parenting concerns are pretty universal when it comes to the basics, but few things are quite as universally troublesome as potty training when it does not go as scheduled. In a decade of helping families with child emotional and behavior issues, I have frequently witnessed the frustration of parents facing this problem with their children, as well as the intense relief they feel when potty habits improve. Interestingly, elimination, or potty incidents are considered pretty n

Parenting is complicated. Equipping yourself with some new tools may make it simpler. Anyone can be positive with their kids when the behavior picture has been pretty. But most of us with kids happen to know that this will not always be the case. I think it is useful for parents to have a plan for how to re-establish a positive tone and direction, when things get really ugly...When kids fail to respond the way we want and the general tone around the ranch has just gotten pret

I recently attended a career day fair at the local junior high school. I was happy they invited me, albeit a little curious about whether there would be any interest in my profession. When it comes to understanding the broad range of things that MFTs do, I know that the words "Marriage" and "Family" in the title can be somewhat confusing to others. In this case, the kids were curious, and I enjoyed helping them learn about what I do for a living. But I noted something interes

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists are qualified to provide general as well as very specialized counseling and therapy on a wide variety of topics. In short, there are very few individual or family counseling topics we cannot tackle with a client. Depending upon training and education, the professional scope for an MFT can be equal in range or even cover more area than that of any other mental health professional (i.e. Clinical Social Worker, Clinical Psychologist, Licen

Empathy allows us to listen and understand differently. It requires patience, respect, and often giving other people the benefit of the doub

Kids are great…Most of the time. Actually, kids are great, SOME of the time. Another way of looking at it is, kids are great when we have lots of patience, and sometimes our patience runs short. No matter how much we love our kids, we become frustrated with recurrent behaviors. Usually, the longer-standing the frustration, the less patience we tend to have for it. It’s not rocket science, but easy to lose sight of in those moments when we are accomplishing amazing parenting f