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Building Resilience in Children and Teens offers strategies to help young people from 18 months to 18 years build seven crucial “Cs” — competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control — so they can bounce back from challenges and thrive throughout life. The book describes how to raise authentically successful children who will be happy, hardworking, compassionate, creative, and innovative. Dr. Ginsburg reminds parents that our goal is to think in the present and prepare for the future, to remember that our real goal is to raise children to be successful 35-year-olds. It’s about more than immediate smiles or even good grades; it’s about raising kids to be emotionally and socially intelligent, to be able to recover from disappointment and forge ahead throughout their lives. The stable connection between caring adults and children is the key to the security that allows kids to creatively master challenges and reach their highest potential. This book offers concrete strategies to solidify those vital family connections. Resilience is also about confronting the overwhelming stress that kids face today. This invaluable guide offers coping strategies for facing the stresses of academic performance, high achievement standards, media messages, peer pressure, and family tension. Young people too commonly survive stress by indulging in unhealthy behaviors or by giving up completely. The strategies offered here are aimed at building a repertoire of positive coping skills. Young people who have these healthy strategies in place may be less likely to turn to those quick, easy, but dangerous fixes that adults fear. The book includes detailed strategies to guide children and teens to create their own customized positive coping strategies. The fourth edition of this already acclaimed book is updated throughout and offers deeper dives into building grit in our children, offering meaningful protection against the effects of childhood trauma, and preparing our families for lifelong interdependence. It also guides parents on how to turn for professional help when needed, reconnect with children who have pulled away from them, and help young people return to their best selves after they have engaged in worrisome behaviors. It also offers strategies for parents to recharge and rebound when their own resilience reaches its limits. |
Amazon.com |
“I like to think of myself as a lighthouse parent, you know reliably there, totally trustworthy, making sure he doesn’t crash against the rocks, but committed to letting him learn to ride the waves.” Two fundamental principles are at the root of resilience. First, a parent’s unconditional love is the most important force in a child’s life. It offers the unwavering security that helps young people develop the confidence to walk through life’s puddles. Unconditional love has to be coupled with high expectations for effort, character and morality. Otherwise, a child will feel nurtured, but not learn to hold himself to high standards. Second, a child will never learn life’s lessons if he is protected from experiencing them. This point has to be tempered with the fact that children need protection from challenges that can bring irreparable harm. These fundamental principles are anything but simple. The challenge of parenting is how to apply these core principles in a complicated world. It doesn’t matter what we know to be right, what we wrestle with is how to do it. There are two questions with which we struggle as we consider how to build resilience in our children.
This book helps you resolve the tension these two principles of resilience pose by offering you the latest in research and a wide breadth of expert opinion. You will learn to balance these complex issues and offer your child the security she can only gain from you and the confidence she can only develop from experience. She will be more than resilient – she will be poised to thrive. This book is groundbreaking because it offers detailed input from teens! Ideally, your own children would have the kind of open conversations that would allow growth in your relationships and better guide you how to parent them. That idealized reality does not always exist. This book will allow you to listen objectively to teens’ views so you can better understand your own child’s needs. The book concludes with a comprehensive section on how to foster optimal communication within your own family. |