Child Development Central

Practical, evidence-based information for parents and professionals.

Mark Bertin M.D.

Legal Rights of Students with ADHD

The best approach is to accommodations for ADHD is to support them in the moment, while teaching student skills to be more independent and successful in the future.

Talking Back to ADHD

Pause and realize the difference between a person and their ADHD, then begin to identify where ADHD affects life.

Turning the Page on ADHD

Naturally, change is hard for all kids, and can be harder for those with ADHD. A new school year is the perfect time to pause, reconsider, and set up new routines.

Collaboration When a Family Has ADHD: Like Parent Like Child

Finding an empathetic, mutual path around ADHD aims families towards a shared goal instead of a battle, while adults build the same skills they’re aiming for in their children.

ADHD Summer Reading Challenge

Reading is one of the most crucial activities for children, promoting language development, building knowledge, and setting up academic success, but ADHD can make it hard.

ADHD and Self Compassion

What’s the impact of living life with ADHD, seeing exactly what ‘should’ be done and often not getting there anyway.

Give Technology — and Yourself — a Rest

The brain needs a break to recover from activity just like our bodies do.

Building Resilience: How to Shift Mental Gears

Stress itself can be defined as the perception something is more than we can handle. That may sound like the most clichéd advice ever – but is a foundation of resilience research.

The Myth of Bootstraps

Appropriate supports for families are the only true bootstraps, a community reaching across party politics and pulling everyone up together.

Mindfulness and Peaceful Activism: Post-Election Resolution

In an era of extremism, the intentions behind mindfulness matter more than ever.

Mental Meteorology & Mindfulness

Long past the time for problem solving or learning from experience, rumination and other patterns may amplify stress. Thinking can be the problem, not the solution sometimes.

An Overview of ADHD Care

ADHD affects far more than just attention, and affects not only children but their family and relationships. Here's what you need to know to manage it comprehensively.

Understanding Behavioral Therapy for Autism

Long-term planning for children with autism requires patience and diligence. Behavioral therapy, as time and labor-intensive as it seems, remains the foundation of skill building.

The ADHD Healthy Living Summer Challenge

Emphasizing healthy living may significantly improve ADHD symptoms

ADHD Goes to College

Planning for freshman year is probably the last thing a graduating senior with ADHD wants to focus on right now. As a parent, though, worry may already be filling your mind.

More to Happiness Than Momentary Moods

Not every mood occurs in response to experience. Some are driven by our own inner chemistry, but we often link outside causes to these haphazard states of mind.

Academic Planning for ADHD Starts Now

For a child with ADHD, grades are not the bottom line for academic planning. Some students get reasonable marks even while struggling significantly.

Mind Your Toes, Manage Your Stress

What does body awareness have to do with stress management? Maybe more than you think.

Understanding Childhood Social Difficulties

One of the basic wishes most parents share is that their children get along, play, and interact well with others. For children who instead struggle with their peers, the earlier interventions start, the earlier they can catch up. Since both ADHD and autism impact relationships, sorting out the ‘why’ often guides what to do next.

Mindful Parenting for ADHD

Addressing ADHD requires perseverance, flexibility, responsiveness, and an ability to find moments of joy and success during challenging times. All of that is much harder to sustain when you’re mentally swamped by anger, fear, or exhaustion. With mindfulness, you promote your own resilience and well-being not only for your own sake, but because your child will benefit.

Mindfulness: The Antidote for Perfectionism

The concept of ‘mindfulness’ often congers up images of relaxation, stillness, or acting in some idealistic, staid way. There’s an assumption that it means being always calm, serene and in control. Because of this, it is occasionally portrayed as a set up for personal failure. Yet, that perspective misses the point of mindfulness in the first place.

Feed the Right Wolf

Fifteen minutes in the barber chair today, and the television news shows me a shooting and tornados and an accident at a local nuclear plant. I want to take action and make a statement when there is something to be done, and I hope others watching do the same - in many ways our world depends on it. But it's an awful lot to take in all at once.

Mindfulness and the Average Smartphone

Technology can provide organization, efficiency, and entertainment, but it can also distract, disorganize, and disorient. In spite of how it often feels, technology at its best aims to make life simpler. Instead of promoting distraction, it can help develop clarity and awareness in our lives. So here are some ways to cultivate mindfulness through technology.

Mindful Eating, ADHD and Nutrition

Even if someone with ADHD is not overweight, executive function may impact healthy eating. And poor eating habits do not only affect nutrition. Difficulty with planning, distractibility, and time management frequently have a domino effect.

Mindfulness, Little League, and Parenting

How much of our parenting time do we spend taking children to ball games, dropping them, and then waiting for the action to begin? And then once the so-called action begins, how much actually happens? The answers, at least until children get older, are an awful lot and not much. It’s all fun and games and bonding together, except when it isn’t.

Bull Durham, Mindfulness and Providers of Care

Choosing to break the self-perpetuating cycle of stress by paying attention to what it feels like to breathe allows the brain to settle. Since most of us don’t know a Crash Davis, we have to break ourselves out. Taking a moment to attend carries great benefit and does not require anything as extreme as eyelid breathing.

Putting Mindfulness on Your Agenda

Everyone experiences stress in some way or another, and people in caretaking roles do in particular. Our communities rely on individuals who choose these paths, and yet no one has the capacity to indefinitely give. So as a care taker, taking care of yourself is essential to sustaining your own well-being. Only then can you be at your best when interacting with others.

The House We Build for ADHD

You’re building a home and a family — one with ADHD in the mix. The sheer volume of information and misinformation about ADHD can compromise your designs and make your house seem built of straw more than bricks. But it needn’t be this way. Reinforce the foundation, build upwards to address the rest of ADHD, and your home can be as solid as every other one on the block.

Thoughts of and for Thich Nhat Hahn

Mindfulness represents something but changes nothing; being mindful changes an awful lot. What will be left behind if the headlines pass is that simple fact. Thich Naht Hahn has said it better than most for longer than I have been alive, though. So here are a few quotes about mindful family life to consider while wishing him a complete recovery....

Time to Put Your Kids on a Media Diet

Recent research, reported in JAMA Pediatrics, shows that parental guidance around media does work. In fact, that one variable alone has a positive result on multiple aspects of child development.

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