An Oscar for the Parenting Channel

by Richard C. Raynard, Ph.D.

Licensed Clinical Psychologist



Caring

President Obama just announced the "My Brother's Keeper" program and  white house task force to look into help for parents.

A huge territory.  Parenting is as different, from family to family, as different countries. Each family raises real differences in their children in happiness, competence, and personal fulfillment.

The evidence is in. If you have been raised in neglect, as an adult you may have cold relations, seething anger, and disillusionment. If your parents were very critical and punitive, you may grow up to feel defective and burdened with shame. If you were always pushed and compared to others, you could grow up with failure on you mind, or even become perfectionistic, to compensate. If you had to be responsible for the care of your brother, sister, or even a parent, you can become self-sacrificing as an adult, an "enabler", with anger underneath. For more, see Young & Klasko (1994).

Yet good parenting is never taught in schools or the media. We are more apt to see weird, dysfunctional families in the serials or in programing, like Wife Swap, etc. The raising of children doesn't make the news. A common path is to raise our children as we were raised. In any case, new parents are mostly on their own.

Think of the odds. Now, 50% or more newborn are to unmarried mothers, often in teenage years. Families themselves have become more scattered; neighborhoods are less like communities; families often have both parents working. You can fill in the rest.

I propose a publicly owned Parenting Channel that would reach everyone, at small relative cost, when they need it. The content should be public-driven, not sponsor-driven, and determined by a board of media professionals and citizens. The production values should have the intrinsically interesting features of todays best TV - personal stories, dramatic series, on-site documentaries, relevant biography, graphic design, breaking news, discussion panels, and more. Never boring. This programming is supplemented by links to developed websites and streamed on line. Commercials are limited to a 5 minute segment at hour's end.

 

The cost? My guess is about $60 million a year. PBS's budget was $200 million in 2012; staff costs about $3 million. About the cost of two fighter jets.

No kidding. The airwaves belong to the public, leased through its agencies and representatives to determine the content of most benefit to the public. Why should TV remain the most irrelevant and pernicious media? The benefit of the Parenting Channel is incalculable and positive. By every measure - good health, less violence, graduation rates, adult income, drug addiction - good parenting works.

Are you ready to tune in?

About Dr. Raynard

Dr. Richard Raynard is a licensed clinical psychologist with 35 years experience resolving a broad range of emotional problems. As a cognitive-behavioral therapist who has specialized in anxiety and phobic disorders since 1980, he has spent the last 35 years fulfilling his life-long desire to explore and define the true purpose of emotions and how people can easily use emotions to create meaning and satisfaction in their lives. Dr. Raynard's series of books on emotions can be found on Amazon.com. His other books include Don't Panic, and Anxiety & Panic Medications.

Boredom - a Lack of Emotion!

by Richard C. Raynard, Ph.D.
Licensed Clinical Psychologist

Boredom is painful. It's waking up and seeing nothing of yourself in the day and going to sleep later realizing that tomorrow will be the same - empty. It can happen to the nicest people.

Confusion abounds over the cause of boredom. The researcher, Danchert, argues in Mind (2013) that boredom is an attention disorder: a lack of discrimination between novel and familiar. Possible solution: train the bored to recognize when an event is novel. Sorry - the lack of discrimination describes the result of boredom, not the cause.

Only recently has boredom become a widely recognized social fact. In Medieval times it was called the sin of sloth. The early French called it nonchalance or languor. In 18th century England, the leisure class struggled with vacuity, tedium, listlessness and insipidity. In the early 19th century it was finally called "boredom", along with rise of factory labor. Interesting.

Bored

Still, the evidence is accumulating in recent studies. Boredom is more likely among the young, the more extraverted and more intelligent. The more prone to boredom have frustrated needs and high activation levels. The very bored can be reckless sensation-seekers, who try to escape boredom in risky ventures. Krasko (2004) sees a major cause in degraded, factory-like education in which students see nothing of themselves. Some are more bored in their leisure time than at work or school. One researcher noted that the bored have little self-focus and cannot "access and understand their emotions" (Eastwood et al, 2007).

To me, boredom is the lack of desire or emotional contact with what you care about. If you can listen to yourself, open your heart to what you care about, and go after what is most meaningful to you, then you can be illuminated and fulfilled.

What a mouthful! To get in touch with what you love and care about is an awesome, immense undertaking. I am humble before that task. But a few have written about how to get there.  Look up the works of Sher, Frankl, Wertheimer, Bingamen, and others.

They are some of the pioneers of boredom.

About Dr. Raynard
Dr. Richard Raynard is a licensed clinical psychologist with 35 years experience resolving a broad range of emotional problems. As a cognitive-behavioral therapist who has specialized in anxiety and phobic disorders since 1980, he has spent the last 35 years fulfilling his life-long desire to explore and define the true purpose of emotions and how people can easily use emotions to create meaning and satisfaction in their lives. Dr. Raynard's series of books on emotions can be found on Amazon.com. His other books include Don't Panic, and Anxiety & Panic Medications.

Caring vs Serotonin

by Richard C. Raynard, Ph.D.
Licensed Clinical Psychologist

Can the act of caring be as effective as medication in battling depression and anxiety? Research into selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) may provide answers that surprise you.

SSRIs are one of the newer class of antidepressants that emerged in 1987 with Prozac (fluoxetine), an approved treatment for depression. Since then, SSRIs have proven effective in treating many anxiety-related illnesses including panic disorder (PD).


Choices



Cherry Picking SSRI Research

Turner and others in 2008 subpoenaed the FDA to release ALL of the studies on antidepressant effectiveness in their archives.  They found that reports of positive effects were 12 times more likely to be published than negative results. Overall, the impression of effectiveness was inflated by about 33%. Over the past century, only 50% of all drug studies were published, mostly positive outcomes (Dobbs, '06).

Small Advantage of SSRI's
Two large scale metanalyses of SSRI effectiveness showed that SSRI's are effective 56-60% of the time. However, between 42 and 47% respond to placebos ("sugar pills"), making the effectiveness of SSRI's only about 10 to 15% better than a placebo (Arrill, '05; Dobbs, '06).

Growing Placebo Power
Since 1985, the potency of placebos, the benchmark for measuring medication effectiveness, has nearly doubled, from about 30% to about 45%. So it is harder than ever to show the effectiveness of medications. In 2007, the FDA approved the fewest drugs of any year since 1983 (PN, '10). The advertising success of Big Pharm may have led to the public increasingly to  believe that any pill will work!

Whoops!
In a major study of depression by NIMH, comparing imipramine to a placebo, they found the most effective psychiatrist got better results with a placebo than the worst performing psychiatrist with antidepressants.  This was back door evidence for the importance of relationships of therapeutic effectiveness (McKay et al, '06).

Relationships are Central
In the big debate about which evidence-based psychotherapies will be reimbursed by insurance, a growing body of critics question the focus on method (LeBow,'10). A metanalysis by Wampol ('02) showed that success in treatment was accounted for mostly by relationship factors between therapist and client, and less by treatment methods. Good relations of caring, empathy and openness may be the most effective part of psychotherapy. Shouldn't we be studying the "placebo effect" rather than the "drug effect"?

Could this mean that love (caring) conquers all?  Well...yeah.

About Dr. Raynard
Dr. Richard Raynard is a licensed clinical psychologist with 35 years experience resolving a broad range of emotional problems. As a cognitive-behavioral therapist who has specialized in anxiety and phobic disorders since 1980, he has spent the last 35 years fulfilling his life-long desire to explore and define the true purpose of emotions and how people can easily use emotions to create meaning and satisfaction in their lives. Dr. Raynard's series of books on emotions can be found on Amazon.com. His other books include Don't Panic, and Anxiety & Panic Medications.