Why did two teens murder their neighbors? A psychologist sheds some light on the matter. We are shocked and horrified that the suspect in the murder of Elizabeth Olten is a 15-year-old female neighbor who knew the family. We want answers as to why this girl would lure a 9-year-old into the woods and murder her in cold blood. We also want to know why a 14-year-old would kill his 4-year-old neighbor, Alex Mercado, and stuff his body in a dryer....

Why are we still debating whether children under the age of 13 should be allowed to walk to and from school alone? Is keeping our children safe really up for debate? As a clinical psychologist, I often counsel victims of violent crime. Given the risks that children face in our time, it is naïve and simply irresponsible to argue, as Lenore Skenazy does in her book “Free-Range Kids,” that because we were all raised in the 1970s in a...

Today is the Yartzeit (Hebrew word for anniversary of a death) of our second child, Ozzie. He died October 18, 2002. Our son died while in utero at 26 weeks. I still remember that cold day because my then 20-month-old son was bundled up with blankets in the stroller watching our family cry and say goodbye to a child we had never really even properly said hello to. I believed or hoped that Asher would escape the pain of the death of his little...

Workplace violence is on the rise in our country. On an average working day, three people will be murdered on the job in the U.S. One million coworkers are assaulted, and more than 1,000 are murdered every year, according to the U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. Homicide is the second leading cause of death on the job, after motor vehicle accidents. What is more shocking than these statistics is the fact that half of...

I keep hearing from clients and friends that they couldn’t imagine being Abby Rike on “The Biggest Loser” — who lost her husband, Wallace, 5-year-old daughter, Macy, and 4-week-old son, Caleb, in a car accident. Every single person said to me, “I would just kill myself. I couldn’t recover from that.” She is truly an inspiration for all of us mothers for her enormous courage of simply going on living,...

It’s about as sordid as a story can get: Jaycee Lee Dugard, then 11 years old, kidnapped and kept as a sex slave in a backyard for 18 years, bears her captor’s two children. The alleged perpetrators of the crime are convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, both charged with 29 counts of kidnapping, rape, and lewd acts with a minor. When trying to process the story, it’s easy to want to believe that Nancy...