Sunday September 23, 2012 at Queen's Park, 11am - 6pm
Jennifer Kolari
Event Info: Healthy Living Stage at 12:30 PM
Jennifer Kolari is a therapist who has been helping children, teens and families get connected for 20 years. Jennifer has appeared in magazines such as Today’s Parent and Canadian Family, and on Canada AM, Breakfast Television, and CBC’s Steven and Chris. Jennifer spent several years counseling children, teens and parents for the Toronto District School Board and serving as a field supervisor for the University of Toronto faculty of Social Work. Before that she was a family therapist at Integra, a children’s mental health centre in Toronto. Jennifer lives in Toronto with her husband and their three children.
Books
You're Ruining My Life (But Not Really)
We tend to accept the fact that younger children generally lack the capacity to make good decisions for themselves, but by the time they are teenagers we often assume that our kids can use their intelligence to monitor and modify their own behaviour. But, as Jennifer Kolari makes clear, the frontal cortex, which is the “thinking” part of the brain, is not fully developed until the age of 25, which means that our teens are often making decisions based on feelings, rather than rational thought. Kolari’s parenting model and CALM technique (Connect, Affect, Listen, Mirror) is based upon the therapeutic strategy of mirroring, which is a way to let people know we understand and empathize with whatever it is they’re experiencing. With warmth and humour she explains how parents can use this technique to effectively de-escalate confrontations, increase the strength of the parent/child bond, and build emotional resilience and independence in teens.
