by Ross W Greene PhD
These days, the guidance on how to raise kids is so ubiquitous and so incongruous that it’s hard to know what’s right and wrong, what’s important and what’s not, what to prioritize and what to let slide, and how best to respond when a child isn’t meeting expectations. Parents feel pressured to prepare their kids for the harsh realities of The Real World while also allowing them to explore who they are and forge their own path, all against the backdrop of daily struggles with homework, hygiene, social media, and the peer culture. It’s easy to lose perspective on the most important goal of parenting: raising a human being.
In Raising Human Beings, Dr. Greene helps parents maintain the balance between helping kids figure out who they are – their skills, preferences, beliefs, values, personality, goals and direction – and ensuring that kids benefit from parents’ experience, wisdom, and values. His collaborative, non-punitive, non-adversarial approach helps parents reduce conflict, enhance parent-child communication, and forge a partnership with their kids, and also helps foster skills on the more positive side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one’s behavior is affecting others, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another’s perspective, and honesty.
by Dan Shapiro
Authored by an experienced child psychologist, this book offers a compassionate and practical roadmap for understanding and addressing the diverse needs of children who may not fit the conventional parenting molds due to ADHD, autism, anxiety, or other developmental and behavioral issues.
At the heart of this book is the belief that every child and family situation is unique, and thus, a one-size-fits-all approach to parenting does not exist. Instead, the author introduces an individualized approach that encourages parents to become detectives in their children's lives, identifying specific challenges, strengths, and triggers to tailor effective strategies that foster growth, resilience, and positive behavior change.
Through a combination of research-based insights, real-life anecdotes, and actionable strategies, "Parent Child Journey" equips parents with the tools they need to navigate their child's journey with empathy, patience, and understanding. The book covers a wide range of topics, including building strong, supportive relationships, communicating effectively, setting realistic expectations, managing crises, and advocating for your child in educational settings.
by Ben Foss
While other books tell you what dyslexia is, this book tells you what to do. Dyslexics’ innate skills, which may include verbal, social, spatial, kinesthetic, visual, mathematical, or musical abilities, are their unique key to acquiring knowledge. Figuring out where their individual strengths lie, and then harnessing these skills, offers an entrée into learning and excelling. And by keeping the focus on learning, not on standard reading the same way everyone else does, a child with dyslexia can and will develop the self-confidence to flourish in the classroom and beyond.
After years of battling with a school system that did not understand his dyslexia and the shame that accompanied it, renowned activist and entrepreneur Ben Foss is not only open about his dyslexia, he is proud of it. In The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan he shares his personal triumphs and failures so that you can learn from his experiences, and provides a three-step approach for success
What is Giftedness? Simply put, giftedness is a unique characteristic that is associated with the difference in brain wiring, which comes with its own sets of advantages and disadvantages. The gifted brain has features like efficiency, connectivity, regional brain volume, super stimulability, and oversized emotions. Giftedness does not only refer to intellectual potential, but it can also relate to extraordinary capabilities in creative thinking, specific academic areas, psychomotor functioning, or visual/performing arts.
Emotional depth goes hand in hand with intellectual complexity, making giftedness an emotional as well as an intellectual attribute. While not all gifted individuals experience extreme emotional states, some gifted children may have oversized emotional processing, which can result in increased anxiety and impact their friendships. These children's ability to see bigger issues with exceptional empathy may make them emotionally intense, and they may mistake the emotional undercurrent as being about them (“it must be my fault” or “aimed at me”).
The neuroscience of gifted brains has implications for emotional processing, and there is a great article about this that you might want to read. Additionally, another article delves into emotional intensity in gifted children.
Furthermore, some children can be both gifted and have learning challenges, which is known as being “twice-exceptional”. Sometimes their giftedness can mask or compensate for their disability, and they appear “average”. Other times, their disability hides their giftedness, and they are seen only as poorly behaved students.