A compassionate, accessible guide for behavior-focused parents that offers easy-to-implement solutions to succeed in...
Boster presents a parenting guide about how children learn to behave.
The author, a speaker and communication coach, blends personal history, client stories, and developmental psychology to explore how “unspoken signals” of tone, posture, and presence can shape emotional security. These signals come from the parent and are directed to the child, and vice versa. Many parents, says Boster, are likely to repeat the same parenting style that their own parents had, unless they learn how to change. Organized across developmental stages, each chapter pairs narrative with reflection prompts. Grounded in self-determination theory, the author’s philosophy centers three needs—connection, autonomy, and competency—arguing that these needs fuel resilience. Boster narrates relatable stories from her childhood and her foray into parenthood. She uses examples that feature her own child’s experiences but also highlights her clients’ issues: for example, a mother whose toddler has connection issues from having too much screen time. Her overview of parenting styles is clear, especially in showing how swings between authoritarian and permissive approaches reflect inherited patterns. Stronger sections examine everyday moments, play, boredom, and screen use as a “hidden curriculum” shaping development. The book’s insights on emotional modeling and adolescence are practical and grounded, while sections about emotional development emphasize the “Platinum Rule”: Treat others how they want to be treated. (The Platinum Rule was introduced by Dr. Tony Alessandra in the 1990s as a way to expand empathy beyond the self.) This approach is a major break from past models of parenting. Ultimately the author argues that for a child to be resilient and emotionally secure, the parents must model this kind of behavior during everyday moments. Boster oscillates back and forth from jargon-heavy terms to relatable anecdotes that will allow readers to process and understand the message of her book.
A compassionate, accessible guide for behavior-focused parents that offers easy-to-implement solutions to succeed in parenting.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781544551906
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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