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GROWING UP BRAVE

EXPERT STRATEGIES FOR HELPING YOUR CHILD OVERCOME FEAR, STRESS, AND ANXIETY

A valuable guide with useful tips for every parent.

A psychologist explains how cognitive behavioral therapy offers simple tools to assist parents in dealing with their children's anxieties.

Pincus (Director, Child and Adolescent Fear and Anxiety Treatment Program/Boston Univ.; co-author: Mastery of Anxiety and Panic for Adolescents Riding the Wave, 2008, etc.) describes exciting new techniques for dealing with anxiety, the “number one mental health disorder, [which affects] more than 18 million [American] adults and perhaps as many as one in five children." She provides anecdotal evidence from her clinical experience and supportive research showing that simple interventions by parents (with or without guidance from a therapist) can be effective within an extremely short time frame. Her hopeful message to parents is that they, “not therapy, not prescription medications—can be the key ingredients in how successfully a child or adolescent begins to approach the world with greater joy and confidence.” The author provides a clear, easy-to-follow guide that will enable parents to deal with their children's problems—e.g., the inability to make friends, fear of school, separation anxiety and obsessive worries. These include tried-and-true practices such as establishing daily bedtime and waking-up routines and leaving space for relaxation after finishing homework. Setting aside a regularly scheduled special play period for as little as five minutes a day, when a mother or father engages in pleasurable, nondemanding play with a disturbed child, has been shown in research studies to be effective. Another tool is the bravery ladder. Here the parent and child break down a fearful activity into a number of manageable small steps. As the child accomplishes each, he or she is rewarded with praise, with planned celebrations following at suitable intervals.

A valuable guide with useful tips for every parent.

Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-316-12560-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012

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MASTERY

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.

The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011

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