Help Your Child Deal With Stress – and Thrive: The transformative power of Self-Reg by Stuart Shanker

Help Your Child Deal With Stress – and Thrive: The transformative power of Self-Reg Reviews

• 
  A. J. Dean

  Such an important and interesting book for anyone whose child struggles with anxiety, paying attention, having meltdowns, violent and challenging behaviour etc. Stuart Shankar is a leading authority on helping children to learn to self regulate. The book covers the different areas of stress that contribute to the dysregulation of the alarm system, leading to it being difficult or impossible for the child to switch off and relax. Looking at the physical, cognitive, emotional, social and what he calls prosocial domains, he explains how stressors in each of these areas contribute to overload and how they interact with and reinforce each other leading to the child's emotional brakes wearing out so they can no longer get themselves calm. He explains how each child is different and that once a child is in fight / flight / overwhelm the first thing to do is to work out what will help to calm and sooth them like a shoulder massage, bath, music, drawing, exercise etc etc. A very different approach to the usual one of telling them off, putting them in time out, giving detentions or punishments for not meeting adult expectations actions that increase stress and lead them to find it even harder to regulate themselves. By looking with different eyes at these behaviours and difficulties as manifestations of stress Shankar suggests we can learn to help our children to calm themselves and bring their rational thinking brain back on line. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who has or works with children with any of the difficulties I mentioned above.
• 
  bpat

  WONDERFUL book! Truly wonderful and wise. The mother of all parenting books really. This in conjunction with Dr Gordon Neufeld's advice is what future good parent exam will be based on! Buy without hesitation.
• 
  Claire Holland

  Great book for professionals, school and parents to read. It's very wordy and needs to be read a few times to sink in but I do recommend it
• 
  Grazia Depedri

  I highly recommend this reading to anyone,especially parents and educators. It gives important insights on potential genesis of what's labelled as bad behaviour and offers tools to work on causes to.improve effects.
• 
  Emma

  I found this book fascinating and really well written. Worth every penny.