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One of the common problems that was addressed was Sensory Processing Disorder, or SPD. As a mental health professional who works primarily with the early childhood population, SPD has become a significant part of my practice.

In young children, there’s a fine line between those positive behaviors that make parents beam with joy, and problem behaviors that cause parents to blush with embarrassment.

Every week, I post articles, parenting tips and other resources for parents on my Facebook page. To provide these resources to you, I have to do a lot of reading and weeding through the good and the bad information that is available on the internet

During a thorough session of Spring cleaning this week, I came across some notes from a child development class about the ways in which children learn.

If you read my blog from last week, you learned that stress during pregnancy can lead to fussy, difficult to soothe babies. This information comes from a studythat looked at maternal stress and anxiety during pregnancy, and outcomes involving the length and health of the pregnancy, and the short and long-term effects on the child as the child grows through to adulthood.

Most people have a preconceived notion about a child’s parents—more specifically their ability to parent—when they see a child behaving in a particular way. Let’s admit it, we’ve all been at the grocery store and been quick to judge parents when we saw how their child was acting. Depending on the age of the child, when we see a child throwing a tantrum, we may instantly jump to the conclusion that this parent doesn’t discipline their child well.

From the moment that parents find out that they’re expecting, the hopes and dreams for the perfect childhood commence. Even when expecting parents don’t know exactly what their child is going to look like yet, they have visions of their child experiencing a happy, healthy and fulfilling life.

Recently, I overhead a group of women sharing war stories about their experiences with child care. The stories ranged from the horrific intoxicated nanny to complaints about the unbelievably high cost of child care and capped with this unexpected question: “Why would you decide to have kids if you weren’t going to raise them?”

When parents and child care providers talk with me about establishing rules for their households and classrooms, I ask them to always identify what it is they want the kids to do, not what they want them not to do. Use Nice Touches versus Don’t Hit or Use Inside Voices versus No Yelling.