by Nicole Beurkens ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2016
A levelheaded, readable manual for taking some of the chaos out of child-rearing.
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A debut guidebook offers natural and common-sense approaches to child behavior problems.
The note of optimism sounded in the title of Beurkens’ work is present throughout the volume, which functions as a written version of a deep, calming breath taken in the midst of the turmoil parents can feel while raising their young children. Her focus is nominally kids with anxiety or mood problems, tackling such issues as attention deficits and energy imbalances. She consistently expresses a patient, evenhanded reassurance for the young parents who are her obvious target readership. Beurkens, a clinical psychologist, uses a stance of big-picture professional observation to keep parents centered on essentials, even in the face of multiple distractions. “Others may see your child only through the lens of their challenges,” she writes, “and sometimes even you may have a hard time remembering who your child is underneath the problems and difficulties that arise.” She outlines the broad-strokes nature of some of those complications and then lays out a series of simple, mostly natural approaches to overcoming them. She stresses good nutrition, for instance—steps to cut down or eliminate excessive sugar and all artificial sweeteners from a child’s diet, strategies to get youngsters involved in thinking about their own eating habits, etc. Given today’s screen-oriented social world, the points Beurkens makes about the importance of physical activity (and even simple movement) are particularly refreshing. “Human beings are wired for connection,” she points out, meaning the face-to-face, personal kind rather than the electronic one. The book’s most convincing section is one of its shortest, on the vital role sleep plays in health (overstressed parents will want to pay close attention to the pages and pages of restorative common sense in this chapter). From first part to last, the message is that parents are doing their children a big service by being vigorously mindful of the basics. New parents especially will find a great many useful tips in these pages.
A levelheaded, readable manual for taking some of the chaos out of child-rearing.Pub Date: March 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9973639-1-3
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Sky Water Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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