What's a Parent's Role?

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Parenting advice abounds, yet child and adolescent rates of depression and anxiety continue to rise.

The focus on making your kid "better," through methods that rely on talking, may hinder more than help.

Parents should consider adopting a "do, not say" approach.

A development psychology class can provide perspective and light your curiosity about your child.

As any parent will tell you, we have been inundated with parenting advice in recent years. There is attachment parenting, gentle parenting, authoritative parenting 2.0, helicopter parenting, even bright interiors parenting. Yet, in spite of it all, kids' mental health has worsened over the last decade. Among adolescents, diagnosed anxiety has increased 61% and diagnosed depression 45%. While the increases are less dramatic among younger children, they are trending upward as well.

It's no surprise, then, that parents are eager to find the right advice or approach, not only for their child's sake but to manage their own anxiety as well. While advice can run the gamut, from general approaches to specific strategies, most share the goal of getting the child to be better in some way, emotionally, behaviorally, or academically. Most also have have a central feature of talking, whether it's being more supportive and encouraging, responding in the right way, or verbally mediating a child's emotion or behavior.

But what if these core assumptions are part of the problem? Here's a parenting........

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