by North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center | Apr 24, 2021 | Ask The Guidance Center Experts, Blog
In this monthly column, therapists from North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center answer your questions on issues related to parenting, mental health and children’s well-being. To submit a question, email NSCFGCexperts@gmail.com.
Question: I had my beautiful baby girl two months ago, but being a mother is nothing like what I expected. I am so depressed most of the time that I have trouble getting up in the morning, let alone taking care of my baby. I’m also paralyzed by fear that something bad will happen to her. How can I be so sad when this is supposed to be one of the best times in my life? I feel like the worst mother in the world.
— Distressed Mom
Dear Distressed Mom: It’s very possible that what you are experiencing is a condition known as postpartum (maternal) depression. First off, please know that this is not about whether or not you are a loving and dedicated mother. It’s a disease like any other, and there are steps you can take to get better.
While many women experience some mild mood changes during or after the birth of a child, 15 percent to 20 percent experience more significant symptoms of postpartum depression and other perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.
The symptoms can include feelings of anger, sadness, irritability, guilt, lack of interest in the baby, changes in eating and sleeping habits, trouble concentrating, thoughts of hopelessness and sometimes even thoughts of harming the baby or herself. These symptoms can also begin during pregnancy, not just after they have the baby.
The good news is that help is available. One resource is North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center’s Diane Goldberg Maternal Depression Program. Services include:
- Screening and assessment
- Individual, couple and family therapy
- Crisis intervention consultation
- Psychiatric evaluations and medication management, where needed
- Support groups
- Back-to-work family support
- Help with self-care
Another great place to find help is the Postpartum Resource Center of New York, postpartumny.org, (855) 631-0001.
While motherhood is wonderful in many ways, it’s OK to admit it can be really hard, especially in the beginning. Don’t hesitate to reach out for help!
Question: My son is in fourth grade and is insisting all his friends already have a cell phone. We think it’s too soon. What should we do?
— Old-fashioned Parents
Dear Old -Fashioned Parents: There is no “right time” to give your child his own cell phone—but acquiescing to the “but everyone has one” plea is definitely not a smart move. Is he apart from you often beyond school hours and active with extracurricular activities? That might make it a useful means of communicating with you. Is he typically responsible with his possessions? Is he good when it comes to respecting limits you put on screen time?
If you feel like it might be useful for him to have a cell phone but you think he is too young for access to texting or the Internet, look into plans that only allow phone calls. Other plans will allow for just calls and text, but that’s all.
Stay tuned for next month’s column, when we’ll talk about how to regulate your child’s use of phones and other tech devices.
During the pandemic, North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center is seeing clients remotely via telehealth platforms or, when deemed necessary, in person. To make an appointment, call (516) 626-1971 or email intake@northshorechildguidance.org.
by North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center | Apr 23, 2021 | Blog
The guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin murder trial was, in no small part, the result of a video taken by a teenaged girl who witnessed the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.
Fifty years earlier, on May 4, 1970, another teenaged girl found herself on the other side of a camera, her arms extended and mouth agape in horrified anguish, kneeling beside the body of Jeffrey Miller, one of four Kent State students shot and killed protesting against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the presence of the Ohio National Guard on campus.
In an April 19, 2021 story in the Washington Post, reporter Patricia McCormick wrote about her meeting with a wary Mary Ann Vecchio, the then 14-year-old at the center of the Kent State photo.
McCormick recalled, as “Mary Ann watched the video of George Floyd’s dying moments, she felt herself plummet through time and space — to a day almost exactly 50 years earlier. On that afternoon in 1970, the world was just as riveted by an image that showed the life draining out of a young man on the ground, this one a black-and-white still photo” taken by Kent State student John Filo.
The impact of certain images cannot be underestimated. In her story, McCormick referenced a few more, including the protester standing alone in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square in China and the unforgettable photo of Kim Phuc, the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing napalm that has just set her home afire.
Perhaps a lesser-known photo was the subject of the book Sons of Mississippi.
The photo, which originally appeared in a 1962 issue of Life magazine, portrays a gathering of seven Mississippi sheriffs at the University of Mississippi just prior to the admission of its first black student James Meredith.
One of the sheriffs is wielding an axe handle as if were a baseball bat, to the obvious delight of the others. They are anticipating the upheaval to come as James Meredith is about to integrate the University of Mississippi.
In his discussion of the photo of the sheriffs, the author Paul Hendrickson cited poet Mark Strand who, referring to a certain artist’s (Edward Hopper) work, said “The shadow of dark hangs over them, making whatever narratives we construct around them seem sentimental and beside the point.” Which, to me, is another way of saying, sometimes no words are necessary.
When she was called to the witness stand in the Derek Chauvin murder trial, Darnella Frazier was asked by the prosecutor, “What did you see?” She responded, “A man terrified and scared, begging for his life.”
Yet, Darnella’s video requires no accompanying narrative – it speaks for itself.
According to McCormick, when Mary Ann Vecchio watched the video of George Floyd’s death last May, “she was so shaken . . . she jumped off her couch and yelled at the crowd in the video.
“Mary Ann,” McCormick said to her, “It seems to me that you’re still that girl in the photo, you’re still that girl saying, ‘Doesn’t anyone see what’s happening here?’”
Mary Ann, who confesses to feeling stuck in that moment half-a-century ago, says that she feels like she needs to do something good. To which McCormick tries to reassure her, “In that moment when you knelt over Jeffrey Miller’s body you expressed the grief and horror that so many people were feeling. You helped end the Vietnam War.”
Fifty years later, when she felt helpless to do anything else to deal with the terror of a traumatic event playing out at close range before her eyes and in the shadow of darkness, Darnella Frazier had the presence of mind to take out her cell phone in broad daylight and start filming. In so doing she brought light to a troubled nation and she brought justice for George Floyd.
Photo Credit: AP Photo/John Filo
by North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center | Apr 20, 2021 | Blank Slate Media, In The Media
Last week an article appeared about me in this newspaper entitled, “Guidance Center CEO announces retirement.” The average age of retirement in the US is 61. When I retire in two months I will have surpassed the average by nine years.
Among the articles I have been reading about retirement are those that offer cautionary notes and tips. For example, I learned that I should not expect retirement to feel like an endless vacation, I should structure my time and I should not neglect my appearance.
The last one will be difficult after working from home during the year of the pandemic. Although I think I’ll add a third pair of pants to the rotation and buy a couple of new sweatshirts.
With respect to structuring my time, although I am retiring after 45 years with the same organization, I have also held a part-time job for 31 years as a journal editor, which I will continue. I also plan to continue writing this column for as long as my imagination will take me and publisher Steve Blank will have me.
I never imagined retirement as an endless vacation, although living in Long Beach has always had a vacation feel to it, being within walking distance of the boardwalk and ocean. Driving home from Roslyn Heights to Long Beach on the Meadowbrook and Loop Parkway since the late 1970s offered me the benefit of landing in a resort every single day.
Despite addressing my impending retirement in a lighthearted manner here, I am well aware that there are risks and losses associated with this major life transition that cannot be simply brushed aside.
I’ll be losing daily contact with my dear workplace friends, some of whom I’ve known for decades. A benefit of my job has been an excellent health insurance plan. As a cancer survivor that has been vital.
Naturally, I will apply for the health insurance I will need in retirement, but I already know that it won’t be quite as good as what I have had for years and that the out-of-pocket costs for certain prescription medications are prohibitive.
As a social worker, I have always been an advocate. I can already see that if I choose to in retirement, there will be no shortage of causes to take on if I wish to continue to employ my advocacy skills.
One of the more mundane operations in preparation for my retirement has been cleaning out my office at work and making some room for my books and other items at home. In making space at home, I came across a box that contained some of my old report cards.
My first-grade teacher Gertrude Finkel wrote: “Andrew tends to go to extremes lately. He is either the best boy in the class, or he creates mischief.” A few years later my Hebrew school teacher wrote: “Andy has some disruptive influence on his neighbors.”
William Wordsworth wrote that “the child is the father to the man” in his 1802 poem “My Heart Leaps Up.” To the extent that this applies to one’s later years, I’m not sure that I want to create mischief in retirement, although it does sound like it could be fun.
Upon re-reading my teachers’ comments, I have come to believe that my disruptive behavior was a precursor, a primitive sign if you will, of what the late civil rights activist, Congressman John Lewis referred to as “getting into good trouble.” I think I can do that, whether or not I neglect my appearance in retirement.
by North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center | Apr 16, 2021 | Blog, Long Island Business News
The good women and men who started the Guidance Center had the foresight, intellect and diligence that led to the creation of a force that would provide quality mental health care for hundreds of thousands of children, teens and family members for nearly seven decades.
I owe the founders a debt of gratitude for offering me such an enriching spot to hang my hat for almost all my adult life. Confucius was right when he said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
Although the 45 years have come and gone swiftly, I’ve developed a capacity akin to time-lapse photography that has enabled me to observe change through a series of evolving images.
The waiting room of Guidance Center headquarters in Roslyn Heights provides a snapshot of who seeks help. And who seeks help at any given time is in part a function of how mental illness and mental health are viewed by the public.
As I contemplate my 45 years, I discover that the waiting room has become a much more richly heterogeneous place with respect to race, ethnicity, religion and language. Increasingly, families who were once averse to seeking outside help for emotional issues occupy that space like never before.
What led to the change? A combination of factors including sustained public education efforts aimed at reducing stigma and ambitious advocacy initiatives directed at reducing disparities and increasing access to care. Both education and advocacy combined to ensure that diseases of the brain be treated on par with diseases of the body.
Along with the demographic changes in who seeks help, there came the need for diversifying the workforce and providing consistent professional education to enhance the cultural literacy of frontline mental health practitioners. This is especially germane today when the social and political winds inside our nation reveal more profound divisions than in all my time at the Guidance Center.
Intersecting with my reel of waiting room images is a reel of traumatic events that I never would have predicted when I started in 1977, all of which impacted the children who sat in our waiting rooms. Just a few examples: the Challenger explosion (1986), LIRR massacre (1993), Columbine High School shooting (1999), 9/11 attacks (2001), Madoff financial disaster (2008), superstorm Sandy (2012), Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (2012), Parkland High School shooting (2018) and today’s COVID-19 pandemic.
Throughout the reel is also a steady succession of racial injustices, deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of law enforcement officers. The final frame I see is the January 6 domestic terrorist insurrection in Washington.
In today’s waiting room sit people of all colors and backgrounds with personal stories of trauma and grief, and far too many young ones who feel as though they cannot live one day longer. They live in a world in which their mental health struggles are compounded by a toxic surround that we as adults either fuel, ignore or deny but cannot escape.
These children have profound troubles and live in a profoundly troubled world. Yet there is hope in places like ours, where people of all backgrounds and skin colors share the dream that their children might live a peaceful and prosperous life in a better world.
My message to anyone who wishes to follow in my footsteps is to never lose sight of the situational surround. Context counts. We can all do better to understand our children from the inside-out and the outside-in. And, if you’re fortunate enough to find your authentic voice, don’t let anyone take it away from you. Healing involves quality care and a strong voice underpinned by a social consciousness, social conscience and an enduring quest for social justice.
by North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center | Apr 15, 2021 | Ask The Guidance Center Experts, Blog
In this monthly column, therapists from North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center answer your questions on issues related to parenting, mental health and children’s well-being. To submit a question, email NSCFGCexperts@gmail.com.
Question: We think our son might be engaging in unsafe driving behavior. The other night, he came home from being out with a friend and we could smell beer on his breath. Worse, he’d been the driver. What can we do?
—Nassau Parents
Dear Nassau Parents: You have reason to be concerned. The statistics are frightening: More teens die from motor vehicle crashes than any other cause of death, and teen drivers are 17 times more likely to be involved in a fatal car crash when they have alcohol in their system as opposed to when they are sober.
The same holds true for marijuana and other drugs. A report from Liberty Mutual and SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions) found that one in five teens admit driving under the influence of marijuana, and one in four say they would take a ride from a driver impaired by alcohol or prescription drugs.
While many adults make foolish decisions about driving when they’ve been drinking, teenagers are even more susceptible to feeling like they’re safe to drive even when intoxicated. Their brains are still developing, and they tend to behave more impulsively, especially when they are under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Plus, when they do consume alcohol, teens are more likely to binge drink than adults.
While the good news is that drinking and driving among U.S. teens has gone down by more than half since 1991, they still drive after drinking an average of 2.4 million times a month.
As a parent, you play a crucial role in your teen’s choices, even though sometimes it might not feel that way. Some ways you can encourage safe driving include:
- Make a driving contract with your teen that agrees upon zero tolerance for drinking alcohol or using drugs when driving.
- Tell them that getting in a car with anyone who has been drinking or using substances is never OK.
- Promise you will pick them up if they end up in that circumstance.
- Insist upon a “no texting while driving” rule—or their phones will be taken away.
- Require seat belt wearing for both the front and back seats, even for a short trip.
- Consider limiting nighttime driving, especially if your teen is a new driver.
- Be a good role model: Follow all the rules of the road and never drink and drive.
Question: I hear about all the things people are accomplishing with their pandemic “down time,” but I feel more stressed than ever, since I’m working at home and have two kids who are in remote schooling part of the time. Am I being too hard on myself?
—Tired All the Time
Dear Tired: In a word, yes! Despite the fact that Shakespeare purportedly wrote King Lear during a pandemic, he surely didn’t have kids pulling on his cloak and asking for help with homework.
The stresses brought on by the COVID-19 crisis have been overwhelming. Please give yourself a break! You don’t need to master crocheting or learn a new language right now. And don’t forget to take care of yourself while you’re focusing on everyone else’s needs. Whatever it is that soothes you—yoga, a warm bath, some time on Netflix—put it in your schedule. And ask for help, whether from your spouse, friend or another person who cares about you. You won’t be a good parent if you are burned out.
During the pandemic, North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center is seeing clients remotely via telehealth platforms or, when deemed necessary, in person. To make an appointment, call us at (516) 626-1971 or email intake@northshorechildguidance.org.
