Parenting with the Brain in Mind

• Learning how to SNAG (Stimulate Neural Activation and Growth) the brain.
• Teaching parents how to establish the right hemisphere to right hemisphere connection with their kids that enables them to feel felt and understood.
• Demonstrating how to co-construct narratives with children in ways that enable them to integrate left and right hemisphere, and enhance self-regulation.
• Distinguishing among the four levels of implicit memory—procedural, emotional, bodily, and perceptual—in customizing interventions to a child’s needs.
• Utilizing the Wheel of Awareness as a tool to enhance consciousness and a child’s sense of self.

Reclaiming Parental Authority

• Understanding the reluctance of post-boomer parents to assert their authority.
• Making explicit the unstated parental fears that often disempower parents and enable their kids to hold them hostage.
• Bringing the child’s Second Family—their network of significant friendships—into the therapy room.
• Combating parental isolation through facilitating home-school partnerships and communication among parents.
• Helping parents assert genuine authority through “I Mean It” moments in which they express themselves as three-dimensional human beings.

Family Therapy for the Postmodern Family

• Conduct an initial interview that involves parents and focuses on collecting the information crucial to successful treatment.
• Assess the six kinds of cases in which it is preferable to see a child separately from his or her parents.
• Become comfortable with the language of play and with the slowing down necessary to work with younger children.
• Utilize family meals, rituals, stories, and drawings to increase the impact of therapy.
• Use yourself and your own positive feelings toward clients to affirm both children and their parents.

Attachment Issues in Stepfamilies

• Understanding the insider-outsider dynamics and loyalty conflicts inherent to the stepfamily experience.
• Helping stepparents recognize the limitations of their roles in discipline and the best ways to develop one-to-one relationships with their stepchildren.
• Learning three levels of intervention with stepfamilies: Psychoeducation, skill-building, and exploring intrapsychic issues.
• Exploring effective strategies for handling conflicts with ex-spouses that can keep children out of the middle.
• Mastering the “soft-hard-soft” approach to framing problems and addressing difficult issues in navigating the potential minefield of stepfamily relationships.

How to Stop Bullying

• Avoid ineffective interventions—like blaming the victim and advice giving—that can make matters even worse.
• Understand how digital technology and social media have shaped the cyber-bullying culture of today.
• Enhance children’s sense of resilience, competence, and self-efficacy while also expanding their peer network.
• Impart self-calming and filtering skills that increase children’s ability to deal with the mean behavior of their peers.
• Guide parents in building social support and mentoring systems for their children while also acting as advocates within the school system.

Child Therapy without Problems: The Kids Skills Approach

• Learning to avoid problem and pathology-based language in favor of focusing on the skills children need to move toward goals they themselves value.
• Emphasizing hope and playful collaboration in generating solutions.
• Understanding how to apply the principles of Kids Skills differently with younger children than with teenagers.
• Involving friends and a child’s social network in generating positive feedback cycles and solutions.
• Mastering the skills of strategic praise, effective apology letters, and turning nightmares into “goodmares.”

Overprotective Parenting

• Address the problem of parents overstating the world’s dangers and discouraging healthy risk-taking.
• Challenge dysfunctional family narratives and encourage children’s mastering manageable levels of risk.
• Heighten parents’ awareness of how they themselves learned life lessons that involved risk-taking.
• Wean parents from the culture of ubiquitous rewarding and over-praise.
• Emphasize the importance of kids taking on responsibility and making a contribution within their families.

Cyber Intimacy and Cyber Solitude

• The blurring of boundaries between ourselves and our computers, smartphones, and i-products.
• The diminishing roles of face-to-face experience in our families and our lives.
• How “virtual intimacy” is enhancing children’s sense of solitude and disconnection.
• How therapy can accommodate itself to the needs of a cyber-saturated society.