Development & Assessment
Latest Development & Assessment News
When Treatment Isn’t Working: Logjams and Next Moves
What to do when the first and second plans stall-peeling the onion, revising formulation, and avoiding endless medication roulette.
Common Misconceptions Families Bring to Child Psychiatry
Cure-seeking, label shopping, sensory myths, and other patterns that quietly derail assessment-and how families and clinicians can reset.
What Makes a Child Different From an Adult in Mental Health Care
Why child mental health cannot simply shrink adult templates: development, dependence, context, and how families can use that difference.
The Child Behind the Symptom: A Practical Guide for Parents and Clinicians
A practical map for looking past the loudest behavior to body, learning, emotion, relationships, and environment.
How Clinicians Think About a Child Without Reducing Them to a Diagnosis
How careful child psychiatry keeps formulation, context, and strengths in view so a diagnosis remains a tool rather than an…
Selective Mutism: Assessment Without Forcing Speech
Selective mutism is more than shyness. How families and clinicians assess and support children without forcing speech.
The Art of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2025)
Williams and Hill's 2025 Cambridge guide to the craft of child and adolescent psychiatry-formulation, family work, and clinical judgment.
When a Child’s Behavior Means Different Things at Home and School
Parents and teachers often describe the same child in seemingly contradictory terms. At home, a nine-year-old may be explosive, defiant,…
How Creative Arts Therapies Can Support Children
Creative arts therapies can help some children express feelings, regulate distress, and engage in care when used by trained therapists…
Nutrition and Children’s Mental Health: What Families Should Know
A balanced guide to nutrition, mood, attention, eating disorder red flags, and child mental health, with credible source links.
Social Media and Adolescent Mental Health: A Balanced Guide for Families
How social media may affect teen mental health, sleep, bullying, body image, and family rules, with source-checked parent guidance.
Gifted Children and Misdiagnosis
How giftedness can mimic or mask ADHD, autism, anxiety and mood problems, and how to assess context, impairment, and twice-exceptionality.
Trauma and the Developing Brain
How trauma affects the developing brain, ACE thinking without fatalism, and what helps children heal.
Building Resilience in Children
Resilience as built capacity: protective relationships, routines, skills, and reduced ongoing threat.
Autism Spectrum Disorder in Children
What autism looks like beyond stereotypes, why bright children are missed, and supports that help.
Sleep Disorders in Children and Adolescents
A practical guide to childhood sleep disorders, mental health links, assessment, and when to escalate care.
ADHD in Children: Assessment and Treatment
A source-checked guide to ADHD signs, assessment, treatment options, school support, and when families should seek clinical help.
Anxiety Disorders in Children
Anxiety is one of the most common mental health concerns in childhood, yet it is often missed because worried children…
Childhood Depression
Depression in children is often invisible to the adults closest to them. Unlike the stereotype of adult depression as visible…
Screen Time and the Developing Brain
Screen time is one of the most debated topics in modern parenting. Headlines alternate between warnings that smartphones are rewiring…
Early Warning Signs of Child Mental Health Problems
Learn the warning signs that a child may need mental health support, what is urgent, and how parents can prepare…
Teenagers Are Not Broken Adults
Why teenagers need to be understood through development, reward sensitivity, sleep, identity, peers, and stress rather than judged by adult…
What It Really Means to Be a Child
Why children are not small adults, and why development, dependence, play, regulation, relationships, and rights all matter when adults try…
Is There Art in Child Psychiatry?
Why child psychiatry needs both evidence and clinical judgment, and why the child in front of us can never be…
The Child Assessment Before Diagnosis
Why a careful child mental health assessment should come before quick labels, and what adults should bring into that first…
Behavioral Health in Children and Adolescents: What Clinicians and Parents Should Know
A practical guide to what behavioral health includes, what patterns concern adults most, and how families and clinicians can decide…
Can We Predict a Child’s Mental Health Future?
What adults can and cannot predict about a child's mental health, and how risk, resilience, adversity, support, and timing matter…
What Adults Miss When They Interpret a Child’s
Adults see behavior from the outside. A child lives it from the inside. Better understanding begins when we slow down,…
Is This Normal? How to Tell Ordinary Childhood From a Real Problem
How context, duration, impairment, and developmental fit help adults separate ordinary childhood variation from signs that need closer assessment.