A Crescent Parent Education Event featuring Dr. Alex Russell

The pandemic shut down many children’s activities, significantly impacting their academic, social and emotional development; it also placed incredible strains on parents and educators. This presentation offers parents an understanding of these impacts, as well as clear and helpful guidelines to support children in the months and years ahead. 

Parents will gain a perspective that helps them slowly shift the burden of responsibility on to their children as they grow – something that helps children take on anxiety adaptively, at the same time as they experience the sense of mastery and competence such growth generates.

This event is presented in partnership with the Crescent Parent Association and the Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education.

Please RSVP to let us know that you will be attending.

Dr. Alex Russell is a clinical psychologist who lives and works in Toronto. He provides assessments and psychotherapy to children and adults, in addition to consulting with schools, teachers, and psychologists. He is a trainer for the Sick Kids Centre for Community Mental Health, and has been a consultant to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. His past research activities include the development and evaluation of an early intervention family therapy program serving families with children at risk, articles on children’s emotional development, and serving on the editorial board of Ideas: Emotional Well-Being in Child Care, a national journal of early childhood educators.

The heart of his message is that children learn through the experience of non-catastrophic, painful failure, and it is through the process of these failures that they mature into resilient, resourceful, and emotionally balanced individuals. Parents need to see failing—whether it’s a test, a course, or a tryout for a team—as a normal part of growing up and not a sign of parental incompetence. In his best-selling book, Drop the Worry Ball: How to Parent in the Age of Entitlement and in his training, Dr. Russell offers a fresh perspective on raising children that is reassuringly familiar and strikingly sensible     
    

As a speaker, Dr. Russell has addressed many parent, teacher and counsellor groups over the years. He is intimately familiar with the culture of the school system and the relationship that parents, teachers, and counsellors share with regard to the children we are raising. He has been an active parent in his community and an avid hockey player and coach.