Keystone Child and Family Therapy
9804 100 Ave # 205 T8V 0T8 Grande Prairie, AB, Canada

A good article on the consequences of sleep training.

This article gives many fun ideas to play with your children when you are tired, feel disconnected, or one or both of you are in a grumpy mood. Play helps both parents and children release stress and helps children respond better to parents direction. Its a win/win situation!

Here is another great article written by Dr. Mercola. This article describes 2 different types of happiness: one (derived from experiences) does not have any positive impact on our heart health, the other (derived from having a greater sense of purpose in life) significantly improves heart health. He describes 10 Keys to Happier Living which include: giving, relating, exercising, appreciating, trying out, direction, resilience, emotion, acceptance, and meaning.

If you have not watched this YouTube video I highly recommend it. This is a wonderful ad put out by Always for what it means to be a girl and how that phrase is more often then not used as an insult. What amazes me is that somewhere between being a young child and an adolescent our definition changes. Lets start having a positive impact on our adolescents self-esteem! http://youtu.be/XjJQBjWYDTs

What great parenting advice!

This article shows why diet and exercise should play a key role in the treatment of depression and anxiety. A large portion of our brain is in our gut and so our lifestyle has significant impact on our mental health.

What a great article demonstrating how to turn tense parenting moments into opportunities to connect. The more connected your child feels to you the more responsive he or she will be to your direction and discipline.

This is an amazing article with many good reasons why hugs are so importantt. I love that the research shows hugs help us fight the flu. One more great reason to increase nurturing in your home is that hugs (and other forms of nurturing) makes children smarter. Research shows that children who have nurturing parents have a 10% larger hippocampus - the area of the brain responsible for learning and memory. So a great New Years resolution would be to increase the amount of hugs you give to family and friends.

Here is a great video that describes the process by which a person is able to create change in their life. Even if a negative experience occurred to an individual in their childhood they are able to work through it as an adult so it no longer negatively affects them. Dr. Siegel describes the positive impact attunement has on individuals when it is experienced in safe relationships. And how attunement is the process by which change occurs. While Dr. Siegel does not talk about this in the video, an example within family relationships is when parents are appropriately attuned to their children. Parents attunement helps children learn to regulate their emotions and process the events that occur throughout the day.

What a wonderful letter. It is a great reminder of how essential play is to development and how important it is for kids not to have so many scheduled activities. Play is also important for parents too! For a list of reasons why play is important across the lifespan please visit our website.

This is very important research. I recommend reading the article and watching the Ted Talk. Stuart Brown has a great Ted Talk on why play is important across the lifespan. For more information on play visit our website and look under the article tab and read Top 32 Reasons to Add Play to your Day. Play is essential for children and adults alike. Over scheduling ourselves and our children can be a detriment to development.

Here is a wonderful opportunity for children who would like to meet Santa but need the environment to not overwhelm their sensory system. Thanks for posting this Function First!

Here is some great new research on Autism. They have recently discovered that they can asses Autism with 97% accuracy through a hug. This is great research as current measures of assessing an individual for Autism are quite subjective.

Here is an awesome article that was originally posted by the Alberta Play Therapy Association. This article provides a great explanation of where worry comes from and why reassuring your child will not work. There are some great tools provided for helping your child manage his or her anxiety. I especially love the second point of highlighting why worry is good. We spend so much time trying to push down or avoid tough feelings that we forget these feelings are just as imp...ortant as positive feelings. Worry serves a protective function. It tells us that we are unsafe for some reason, which in some circumstances is true. However, sometimes or brains get confused and give us a false alarm. Sometimes our brains are like a very sensitive fire alarm that needs help understanding that we are in fact safe and not in danger. Our children need support to learn how to do this. The tips in this article help parents with this process. Please note that sometimes your childs anxiety may be too great to regulate and manage with coping strategies. If this is the case a professional trained in child development and family therapy can provide extra support in understanding the source of the anxiety and helping your child learn to manage it.

This article is long but worth reading. It discusses research that shows you cannot "spoil" a baby by providing too much love and attention. And, in fact, shows that by not being appropriately responsive you can unintentionally cause a baby to experience stress and possibly trauma by not being responsive enough. This article also demonstrates the commonly held belief that babies and children are resilient is a fallacy. Whether babies are given excellent care and nurturin...g or experience trauma and neglect their brains are developing a blueprint for how to respond to life across their lifespan. This research also has significant implications for those parents who Sleep Train their children. Many believe that once a baby stops crying through the process of sleep training he or she has learned to self-soothe and is content. However, this babys brain is in a constant state of alar and has learned that crying wont hep and has in actuality withdrawn. This experience also changes the brain, creating a much more sensitive stress response over the lifespan; READ: anxiety. Parents it is okay to nurture our children and it is a huge benefit to their brain development to respond to them at night and rock them to sleep. ~Sabrina See more

This is an interesting article with newer research on Autism. The article explains why the brain is dependent on synapse pruning and that synapse pruning may not occur in those with autism.

Hello! My name is Sabrina Ragan. I am the Clinical Director for Keystone. I am so excited to launch our Facebook page. Here you will find different information about child development, parenting strategies, and fun things to do with your family around Grande Prairie. If there are any topics you would like us to write about please send us an email, we would love to hear from you. Also, take some time to look at our website as we have a few articles that you may find helpful. Periodically check back to both our Facebook page and our website as we are continually adding things.