Pediatric Nurse Navigator

04/11/2025

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04/10/2025

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03/04/2025

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Anxiety is the most common mental health disorder in children and adolescents. While treatment can be very effective, diagnosis can be tricky, because anxiety can show up in lots of different ways. Here are some of the signs:

• Physical symptoms: Headaches, stomachaches, sweating and racing heart can all be signs of anxiety.

• Avoiding certain situations: Depending on what makes them anxious, kids might avoid things that other kids enjoy or are comfortable doing. For example, kids with social anxiety might avoid playing with other kids or ask to stay home from school.

• Difficulty concentrating: Anxious thoughts can distract kids from schoolwork and other tasks.

• Trouble sleeping: Worrying can interfere with kids’ sleep.

• Disruptive behavior: Kids with anxiety sometimes lash out or act aggressive when they are overwhelmed by uncomfortable feelings.

• Clinging to parents or caregivers: Children with anxiety may have trouble separating from their parents, and need lots of reassurance.

• Being hard on themselves: Some anxious kids worry a lot about failing or looking bad in front of other people. They might have low self-esteem or say mean things about themselves.

Read the full article and learn more about anxiety in children here:
https://childmind.org/article/what-are-the-signs-of-anxiety/

02/28/2025

ARFID became a clinical diagnosis in 2013 with the release of the DSM-5. Because it’s a relatively new diagnosis, clinicians are still learning about the disorder and how to treat it.

In general, early symptoms of ARFID (avoidant restrictive food intake disorder) look like extreme forms of picky eating. Some behaviors to look out for in young children include:

– Liking very few foods
– Avoiding specific foods or groups of foods based on qualities like texture or color
– Pickiness that gets worse over time, including refusing to eat foods that they once liked
– Anxiety at mealtimes
– Intense fear of choking or vomiting
– Eating very slowly
– Lack of appetite or getting full quickly
– Complaints of feeling sick after eating

Read more on ARFID here: https://childmind.org/article/what-is-arfid/

12/16/2023

A researcher and a practitioner make a case for going beyond phonics to systematically build children's broader language development.

12/02/2023

New research reveals that infants primarily learn language through rhythm rather than individual sounds, challenging traditional theories. The study emphasizes the importance of rhythmic speech patterns, like nursery rhymes, in early language development.

11/30/2023

Researchers revealed that newborn babies inherently perceive musical beats, a skill separate from their statistical learning ability.

09/16/2023

A Father’s Story

I lost my second son last week. The first was lost to an avalanche, the second to su***de. Nathaniel had struggled with depression most of his 33 years. I'm not posting this because I'm looking for sympathy. I'm actually looking for something else.

It may seem strange to someone who has never had to deal with a mentally ill person, but I have been mourning Nate's loss for two decades and I have finished the process. So many su***de attempts, so many bloody traumas, and so many failed efforts to get him help, I had resigned myself to this possibility.

"I'm sorry, Dad. I've dug such a deep hole for myself and I don't know how I can ever recover."

The brooding remained, though we were able to talk about deeper things. Nate met a young woman, got married, a baby was born, and they were very happy. Baby Max looked just like Nate and my son suddenly seemed full of hope.

The joy lasted only a month.

In January of this year, Max went to sleep and never woke up. When they found their 36 day old son, his lips were blue and there was nothing anyone could do. Nate fell into his final bout of depression.

Here’s what I really want to say about mental illness...

If a child is born with a hole in her heart, everyone in our society responds the same way.

We say, "That’s so sad! Is there something we can do?"

No one wags their head at the child or the parents as they lament, "You must have done something wrong!" Sympathy is offered rather than ignorant condemnation. When a child is born with a chemical imbalance or a genetic predisposition towards mental illness, they shall face a lifetime of shame and blame from a society that is truly clueless about the nature of the problem.

What we need to understand is that the brain is just an organ, it may be the most complicated organ in the body, but it is still just a mass of biological stuff that is susceptible to disease like a liver or a lung or a pancreas.

The fact that our culture offers sympathy to a patient with a damaged heart but wags its collective head at a patient with a damaged brain suggests that we never left the dark ages when it comes to our understanding of mental illness.

I have to confess that I was just as guilty of this ignorance.

I was raised in a happy family with happy parents, no mental illness, no addictive personalities. I was clueless and unprepared for the traumas that awaited me after I married into a family with a history of alcoholism and mental illness. It never even occurred to me that any of my children might inherit a genetic predisposition.

When the illness first showed itself in Nate, he was about 13 years old and looked like immaturity to me. I would get angry at him, but that didn't work.
I would try to reason with him, but that didn't work.
We took him to counselors, but that didn't work either.
Nothing seemed to work.

It is the most awful thing in the world to watch a child spiral down into an emotional oblivion and be unable to do anything about it.

I hate powerlessness, I hate it more than anything else.

All of this was followed by friends and acquaintances shaking their heads and saying, "You must have done something wrong."

I was amazed by the eagerness with which people arrived at this conclusion because I was there everyday for my kids. I greeted them when they got home from school, helped them with their homework, took them to my art shows, cheered them on at their sporting events. We built Lego spaceships and told grizzly bear stories and went on scavenger hunts. I sang them to sleep at night with my guitar. I did everything my parents did when they raised me, but the results were very different and demoralizing.

So, if there is a lesson in all of this, perhaps it could be summed up with one word- Grace.

When you see someone suffering with mental illness or you see parents trying their best to deal with a child who is suffering, please don't shake your heads.

Please don't automatically assume that some evil has been committed.

Just offer them grace.

It won't fix the fundamental problem, but it will show the kind of compassion and solidarity that is so often missing in a society that just doesn't understand.

Thank you to the wonderful writer and father, William Kautz, who allowed me to shorten and share his beautiful words.

In honor of World Su***de Prevention Day 💙

08/24/2023

YES!!!!!

07/24/2023

Resilience chronicles the birth of a new movement among pediatricians, therapists, educators and com

07/21/2023