Day: October 2, 2023

Parents, does this scenario sound familiar to you?
You’re at the grocery store and your four-year-old starts screaming because they want you to buy them candy. For a myriad of reasons — they’re crying and distressed, you’re exhausted and embarrassed — you surrender to their demands.
This is what overindulgent parenting can look like, says Lauren Silvers, a child psychologist based in Washington state who specializes in children with social and behavioral problems. It’s when you give in to your child’s whims and desires because you don’t want to see them frustrated or uncomfortable, or want to avoid conflict.
This can be harmful to a child’s development if it becomes routine, says Silvers. “There are lots of negative outcomes associated with overindulgence, anything from over-dependence on others and being unable to learn necessary life lessons.”
Research has shown that this kind of parenting is associated with children who have low self-control, social anxiety such as fear of missi..

There’s little consensus over the best way to teach children and teens about sexuality in this country and research provides scant guidance. Educational programs that directly target sexual behaviors and attitudes frequently fail to show reductions in unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted infections.
The political debate over sex ed, meanwhile, is taking place against a perplexing public health backdrop. The teen pregnancy rate has plummeted over the past 30 years, while epidemics of sexually transmitted infections among younger Americans are showing no signs of slowing. The reasons for these divergent trends are unclear.
State data, by contrast, can sometimes look deceptively stark and clear. Consider Arkansas and Massachusetts. Arkansas, which requires abstinence to be emphasized in sex ed classes, has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in the country (30 out of 1,000 females ages 15 to 19). Massachusetts requires that sex ed be culturally appropriate and unbiased, withou..