Mad River Behavioral Health

For the purpose of distinguishing between Corporal Punishment (CP) and Physical Abuse, I will use the definition of corporal punishment as defined by Straus (1994a).  “Corporal punishment is the use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain but not injury for the purposes of correction or control of the child’s behavior” I consider anything beyond this limited definition of CP to be physical abuse.  Physical abuse as defined by the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information (2000), is: " Physical abuse is characterized by the infliction of physical injury as a result of punching, beating, kicking, biting, burning, shaking or otherwise harming a child. The parent or caretaker may not have intended to hurt the child, rather the injury may have resulted from over-discipline or physical punishment. (What Are the Main Types of Maltreatment? section, para. 2) "  Just to be clear, I'm personally and professional oppose...

You can't. Don't do it. Ok, so we can a little bit, to a point. Some behavioral gestures are so common, like smiling, laughing, etc., that we can safely infer meaning. But, if we go past the basic observation, we can also get our selves into some pretty deep trouble ... pretty quickly ... by over reaching - interpreting more complex behaviors, one's that matter a bit more. We can see that a client is angry, but we cannot know what specifically she is angry about -- even if we observe a conflict in action. The client may have been angry about something that happened early in the day, last week, a few years ago, and / she may be trauma reactive (more on this another time), and then brought her pre-existing condition into a current situation. Note: We all bring our pre-existing condition into current situations. The problem with interpreting behavior is ... it requires us to become psychics, to read minds. We can observe a behavior, but we cannot know what it m...

Anger management If you want your children to be able to take space in order to calm down, you will need to be very good at taking space to calm down.  Parenting is leadership by example. More on this soon.