One established [treatment] method is called Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, or P.C.I.T. Originally developed in the 1970s to treat disruptive disorders — which typically include violent or aggressive behavior in preschoolers — P.C.I.T. is generally a short-term program, usually 10 to 16 weeks under the supervision of a trained therapist, with ongoing follow-up in the home. Luby adapted the program for depression and began using it in 2007 in an ongoing study on a potential treatment. During each weekly hourlong session, parents are taught to encourage their children to acquire emotion regulation, stress management, guilt reparation and other coping skills. The hope is that children will learn to handle depressive symptoms and parents will reinforce those lessons.

Parents can get angry in their frustrating fight for influence, adolescents can get angry in their frustrating fight for freedom. However,the battle is finally lost and won as the new generation defeats the old.

New research may help parents when they write the monthly check for music lessons…The research strongly suggests that the neural connections made during musical training also prime the brain for other aspects of human communication.

ScienceDaily:  Essential ingredients of supportive sibling relationships.

[A new paper] urges parents to think about the relationship they want their kids to have with each other–now and as adults–and to be intentional in helping them create that positive, supportive bond.

How-to suggestions included in the article.

From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think…

“A child has to have some responsibilities. Then by the time they go off to college, you don’t have to have a three-hour lecture on the steps of the dormitory.”

The results show that children’s negotiations form part of their play, and that these negotiations have a clear purpose: to agree on both how they can be together in their play and the content of their play.

“Our work shows that, while the infant brain is wired to form attachments at all costs, abusive attachments have negative consequences in social behavior development.”

“We’ve shown that 9-month-olds are sensitive to ‘more than’ or ‘less than’ relations across the number, size and duration of objects. And what’s really remarkable is they only need experience with one of these quantitative concepts in order to guess what the other quantities should look like”…

But what about children? As an ingredient to a happy marriage, kids were far from essential, ranking eighth behind good sex, sharing chores, adequate income and a nice house, among other things. Only 41 percent of respondents said children were important to a happy marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990.