Showing titles in Developmental Psychology

Today's parents are constantly pressured to be perfect. But in striving to do everything right, we risk missing what children really need for lifelong emotional security. Now the simple, powerful "Circle of Security" parenting strategies that Kent Hoffman, Glen Cooper, and Bert Powell have taught thousands of families are available in self-help form for the first time. Filled with vivid stories and unique practical tools, this book puts the keys to healthy attachment within everyone's reach - self-understanding, flexibility, and the willingness to make and learn from mistakes.

Offers play therapists practical ways of handling a pervasive issue with intense and aggressive play by their clients. With an understanding of aggressive play based on brain function and neuroscience, this book provides therapists with a framework to work authentically with aggressive play, while making it an integrative and therapeutic experience for the child.

The author of The Defining Decade explains why the twenties are the most challenging time of life and reveals essential skills for handling the uncertainties surrounding work, love, friendship, mental health, and more during that decade and beyond.

Many tens of thousands of parents have found the facts they need about high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including Asperger's syndrome, in this indispensable guide. Leading experts show how you can work with your child's unique impairments - and harness his or her capabilities.

Fat Talk argues for a reclaiming of “fat,” which is not synonymous with “unhealthy,” “inactive,” or “lazy.” Talking to researchers and activists, as well as parents and kids across a broad swath of the country, Sole-Smith lays bare how America’s focus on solving the “childhood obesity epidemic” has perpetuated a second crisis of disordered eating and body hatred for kids of all sizes. She exposes our society’s internalized fatphobia and elucidates how and why we need to stop “preventing obesity” and start supporting kids in the bodies they have.

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution. Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood.

First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation. Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive-making tools, for example, or using language - survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible.

Any conversation about effective teaching must begin with a consideration of how students learn. However, instructors may find a gap between resources that focus on the technical research on learning and those that provide practical classroom strategies. How Learning Works provides the bridge for such a gap. Distilling the research literature and translating the scientific approach into language relevant to a college or university teacher, this book introduces seven general principles of how students learn.

Current child-rearing techniques seek to develop children who are confident, self-assured, and unafraid to speak their minds-lions instead of lambs. Although largely positive, this shift has brought with it some very serious problems in our children's behavior. Without going back to an authoritarian model, Joe Newman has developed new ways of helping children develop the ability to self-regulate without undermining their confidence, and individuality.

Kristin Neff, PhD is a professor in human development whose 10 years of research forms the basis of her timely book. Self Compassion offers a powerful solution for combating the current malaise of depression, anxiety and self criticism that comes with living in a pressured and competitive culture. Through tried and tested exercises, listeners learn the three core components that will help replace negative and destructive measures of self worth and success with a kinder and nonjudgmental approach in order to bring about profound life change and deeper happiness.

As parents today, we often feel that our role is to protect our children from the world: to cushion them when they fall, to lift them over obstacles, and to remove sharp rocks from their path. But controlling a child’s entire environment and keeping all pain at bay isn’t feasible—we can’t prepare the world for our children, so instead we should focus on preparing our children for the world.

From internationally renowned family consultant Kim John Payne comes an eloquent guide that seeks to help parents reclaim for their children the space and freedom that all kids need for their individuality to flourish.

The knowledge of death is so terrifying that we live most of our lives in denial of it. One of the most difficult moments of childhood must be when each of us first realizes that not only we but all our loved ones will die—and there is nothing we can do about it. Or at least, there hasn’t been. Today, we are living through a revolution in biology. Giant strides are being made in understanding why we age—and why some species live longer than others. Could we eventually cheat disease and death and live for a very long time, possibly many times our current lifespan?

Cutting-edge research reveals that parents can play a huge role in helping toddlers and preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) connect with others and live up to their potential. This encouraging guide from the developers of a groundbreaking early intervention program provides doable, practical strategies you can use every day. Nearly all young kids - including those with ASD - have an amazing capacity to learn. Drs. Sally Rogers, Geraldine Dawson, and Laurie Vismara make it surprisingly simple to turn daily routines like breakfast or bath time into fun learning experiences.

The Behavior Code unlocks a wealth of proven practices to help teachers, counselors, and parents identify the messages underlying challenging student behaviors and respond in supportive ways.

Far too often, our students attain only a superficial level of knowledge that fails to prepare them for deeper challenges in school and beyond. In Teaching for Deeper Learning, renowned educators and best-selling authors, Jay McTighe and Harvey F. Silver propose a solution: teaching students to make meaning for themselves.

Being a grown-up isn't easy. Whether you're graduating from college, starting a career, trying to gain financial independence, or dealing with the ups and downs of relationships, adulthood can be more than a little overwhelming. The truth is that being an adult is more than just paying your bills, buying groceries, or fixing a leaky faucet. It's also about developing healthy emotional skills when you are confronted with adult life challenges.

If you're the parent of a "smart but scattered" teen, trying to help him or her grow into a self-sufficient, responsible adult may feel like a never-ending battle. Now you have an alternative to micromanaging, cajoling, or ineffective punishments. This positive guide provides a science-based program for promoting teens' independence by building their executive skills - the fundamental brain-based abilities needed to get organized, stay focused, and control impulses and emotions.

The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it.

An award-winning scientist offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the mind-body connection and its profound impact on everything from advertising to romance. The human body is not just a passive device carrying out messages sent by the brain but rather an integral part of how we think and make decisions.