Raising Resilient Kids

Mom’s Choice award-winner for Excellence! As you reflect on how unavoidable life circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic may be influencing your children, family, and other loved ones, be encouraged by the compelling and inspiring vignettes shared in this work. Be empowered to have faith, set goals, and take action . . . to stay the course and enjoy many more decades of a joyful, blessed, and healthy life. With so many “experts” touting different approaches to raising thriving children, how do you know which is the best one? Dr. Rhonda Spencer-Hwang, professor of public health at Loma Linda University and mom of three, had the same question. As a member of a community known worldwide for its health and longevity, often referred to as a Blue Zone, she decided to study the area’s many centenarians to find out what they—or their parents—did right in childhood to make them so resilient to stress, disease, and the adversities of life. In Raising Resilient Kids, Dr. Spencer-Hwang reveals the intriguing findings from her research and offers eight principles for raising happier, healthier children who are equipped to flourish despite life’s inevitable adversities. Readers of Raising Resilient Kids will learn how to: Empower children with determination, motivation, and empathy Win over picky eaters and others who resist new routines Reduce negative stress and boost happiness Instill the values that motivate children to serve and help others Enhance academic performance through healthy habits Help kids begin to explore their passions and purpose.

Discusses the importance of fostering the qualities of resilience in children, and offers specific ideas and strategies designed to help parents raise strong, hopeful, optimistic children.

Raising Resilient Children: Parents and Teachers Working in Partnership to Empower the Children in Our Lives provides tips that you can use in your daily interactions with children to create an environment in which children will thrive. We all want to raise good children, children who are kind, smart and well prepared to become adults in an increasingly complicated world. The best predictor of a child's future success is their level of resilience, their ability to overcome challenge. Yet, this skill set has been largely ignored in the past. Teachers and parents are the greatest influences on a child's mindset and if we work together to foster resilience in our children, their potential for happiness and success increases exponentially. If you are a teacher, looking for practical classroom tips to increase emotional intelligence and self-regulation, this book is for you. If you are a parent, in search of ideas for how to elevate your child's mental well-being, this book is for you too.

This book examines resilience in childhood, focusing on positive functioning and development, often in the face of everyday difficulties and adversities. It highlights critical areas in which children and their families can demonstrate resilience and attain positive social, emotional, academic, and behavioral life trajectories. The book describes key factors related to enhancing resilience for children, such as positive relationships with adults, positive school environments, and meaningful connections with others. It provides practical guidelines for promoting resilience in youth and reviews the critical nature of resilience across various situations, critical issues, and different developmental periods. It offers guidance on strategies for fostering resilience in children. Key topics featured include: Raising children to have grit and tenacity. Fostering resilience in children at school and within their families. Nurturing resilience in children with chronic illnesses and posttrauma. Resilient Children is an essential resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians, therapists, and other professionals in developmental, clinical, and school psychology, family studies, public health, and social work as well as all related disciplines, including educational psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, and pediatrics.

With anxiety at epidemic levels among our children, Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents offers a contrarian yet effective approach to help children and teens push through their fears, worries, and phobias to ultimately become more resilient, independent, and happy. How do you manage a child who gets stomachaches every school morning, who refuses after-school activities, or who is trapped in the bathroom with compulsive washing? Children like these put a palpable strain on frustrated, helpless parents and teachers. And there is no escaping the problem: One in every five kids suffers from a diagnosable anxiety disorder. Unfortunately, when parents or professionals offer help in traditional ways, they unknowingly reinforce a child's worry and avoidance. From their success with hundreds of organizations, schools, and families, Reid Wilson, PhD, and Lynn Lyons, LICSW, share their unconventional approach of stepping into uncertainty in a way that is currently unfamiliar but infinitely successful. Using current research and contemporary examples, the book exposes the most common anxiety-enhancing patterns—including reassurance, accommodation, avoidance, and poor problem solving—and offers a concrete plan with 7 key principles that foster change. And, since new research reveals how anxious parents typically make for anxious children, the book offers exercises and techniques to change both the children's and the parental patterns of thinking and behaving. This book challenges our basic instincts about how to help fearful kids and will serve as the antidote for an anxious nation of kids and their parents.

Being partnered with a narcissist or borderline personality can be hard enough, but learning how to shield children from the fallout is paramount. Here, the authors show readers how to manage parenting when a narcissistic or borderline partner is part of the equation. Life in a narcissistic family system is at best challenging, and too often filled with chaos, isolation, emotional outbursts, and rigid controlling behaviors. It is too often devoid of peace and emotional safety. In the worst outcomes, children in these families grow up with low self-worth, issues with trust and belonging, and a lack of self-compassion. They are at significant risk of carrying the cycle forward and having poor adult relationships. This book offers a way to intervene and disrupt the cycle of negative outcomes for children. Written by two family therapists who bring a combined total of sixty years of clinical practice with individuals and families, the book pulls no punches, giving clear-headed advice, easy to follow actions to help children, and an abundance of teaching examples. Instead of the doom and gloom scenarios often presented about life with a narcissist or borderline, this book provides a much more positive outlook, and most importantly, it offers hope and a path to an entirely different outcome for the family members. Supported by current research in neuroscience, mindfulness and parenting information, the book focuses on teaching resilience and self-compassion to raise emotionally healthy children, even in a narcissistic family system. It starts by helping parents get a clear understanding of what they face with a narcissistic or borderline partner. There is no room here for denial, but there are also many options to explore. It explains how and why the narcissistic family system functions so poorly for raising healthy children, and pinpoints the deficits while providing information on how to intervene more effectively for the benefit of the children. Using their years of experience, the authors present ideas for staying together as well as knowing when to leave the relationship and how best to do that. Emphasis throughout the book is on supporting and strengthening the reader with encouragement, concrete ideas, skills and compassionate understanding.

An examination of the child alienation problem from the perspective of a lawyer/therapist/mediator who trains professionals on managing high-conflict disputes.