Kids in Chaos: Getting a Handle on Restoring Balance in Relationships
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Gabor Maté, MD |
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| Date: | Friday, October 22, 2010 | ||
| Time: | 9:00 am to 4:30 pm | ||
| Location: | Metro-Central YMCA 20 Grosvenor Street, Toronto (Click here for directions.) |
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| Fee: | $165 up to September 9 $175 after September 9 (Please see Fees page for multiple-registration discounts.) |
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This workshop will be based on Dr. Maté’s four best-selling books. It will focus on the apparent loss of resilience in today’s children and teens, and the difficulties that many health care providers, educators, counsellors, social workers, and parents are witnessing or experiencing first-hand and that are due to broken attachments and stressed relationships. Dr. Maté’s presentation will be evidence-based, balanced with a compassionate understanding of today’s challenges, and will provide the practical means to resolve these challenges.
A disturbingly large number of children are currently diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, learning disabilities, or with conduct problems such as Oppositional Defiant Disorder and medical problems such as anxiety and depression. In addition, caregivers such as parents, teachers, and health care providers are frequently struggling with children who do not have a diagnosis but are displaying troubling behaviours that indicate a lack of interest in learning, lack of resiliency, poor compliance with adult expectations and values, alienation, and in more serious cases, drug and alcohol abuse, risky behaviours, and precocious sexuality.
Dr. Maté will detail the origins of these problems in our fragmented and stressed society. He will also offer recommendations for addressing these difficulties through developing and supporting positive, attentive, and nurturing relationships with our children. This presentation will cover how healthy child development is related to the attached relationship with parents, teachers, and other adults, and why even for the average “normal” child, the attachment relationship with adults has been undermined, leaving parents and teachers frustrated and many children alienated and immature.
You will learn how the human brain develops in interaction with the social/psychological environment, and how the stresses in our culture have undermined the necessary conditions for healthy development, and their consequences in childhood and adolescent disorders.
You will learn —
- How to restore the healthy adult orientation of our children, including methods of discipline that do not alienate children but bring them closer
- How to restore the resilience of children to promote their healthy development
- How to recognize intra-family stresses, and how to deal with them to create a safe, nurturing environment for our children
- What peer orientation is, how it competes with children’s adult attachments, and how to recognize its signs
- How peer orientation leads to boredom, aggression, bullying, precocious sexuality, and “unteachability”
Gabor Maté, MD, is a physician, best-selling author, and highly regarded public speaker and seminar leader. His four books are all Canadian bestsellers and cover a wide but related range of topics. Scattered Minds challenges the medical model of treating ADHD. When the Body Says No examines the relationship between stress and our physical and mental health within the frameworks of neuroplasticity, attachment, and psycho-social environments. Hold on To Your Kids describes the demise of parental influence in North American culture and what can be done to re-establish relationships crucial to healthy development. His most recent work, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addictions, won the Hubert Evans prize for literary non-fiction. His new book, The Making and Unmaking of Bullies and Victims: A New Look at Contemporary Malaise, co-authored with developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld, is due later this year.