by Jim Gillen | Jun 2, 2019 | Media
We’ve noticed that our granddaughter has reached the age where friendship skills are very important. She’s been asking us questions about friendships, conflicts, boys and girls, and other things that come along with developing a social self. As many parents know,...
by Jim & Lynea Gillen | May 3, 2019 | Media, Mental Health
One of the problems with screen time is that it comes at the expense of activities kids need to be engaging in for healthy physical, cognitive, and emotional development – most vitally free play (physical and imaginative alike), face-to-face communication, and sleep....
by Jim & Lynea Gillen | Mar 24, 2019 | Brain/Mind Science, Media, Mental Health, Mindfulness
Where were you during the Great Facebook Outage of 2019? Thanks to a server configuration change, Facebook – and Instagram and WhatsApp – went down for much of the world one day earlier this month. While some people welcomed the 12-hour outage as “a nice short...
by Lynea Gillen | Oct 6, 2017 | Anxiety, Media, Trauma
These past several weeks have brought plenty of difficult, heartbreaking news. The Las Vegas shooting. Devastation from hurricanes on the Gulf Coast and in the Caribbean. Intimations of new warfare. Undoubtedly, memories and perhaps even strong emotion arose in you as...
by Lynea Gillen | May 27, 2017 | Media, Mental Health
By Lynea Gillen Across the US and Canada, schools have been warning parents about the new Netflix series 13 Reasons Why and its handling of teen suicide. If you’ve been following the controversy, you’re familiar with the concerns – that it glorifies suicide, that it...
by Lynea Gillen | Nov 13, 2016 | Media, Mental Health
Several years ago, the children in the 6th grade classroom I was visiting as a school counselor started to talk about the dangers in the world and how many “bad” people there were “out there.” I asked them to tell me more. They told me about stories from the news,...