The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives - Hardcover

Stixrud PhD, William; Johnson, Ned

 
9780735222519: The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0735222517 ISBN 13: 9780735222519
Verlag: Viking, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

“Instead of trusting kids with choices . . . many parents insist on micromanaging everything from homework to friendships. For these parents, Stixrud and Johnson have a simple message: Stop.” —NPR

“This humane, thoughtful book turns the latest brain science into valuable practical advice for parents.” —Paul Tough, New York Times bestselling author of How Children Succeed

A few years ago, Bill Stixrud and Ned Johnson started noticing the same problem from different angles: Even high-performing kids were coming to them acutely stressed and lacking motivation. Many complained they had no control over their lives. Some stumbled in high school or hit college and unraveled. Bill is a clinical neuropsychologist who helps kids gripped by anxiety or struggling to learn. Ned is a motivational coach who runs an elite tutoring service. Together they discovered that the best antidote to stress is to give kids more of a sense of control over their lives. But this doesn't mean giving up your authority as a parent. In this groundbreaking book they reveal how you can actively help your child to sculpt a brain that is resilient, and ready to take on new challenges.

The Self-Driven Child offers a combination of cutting-edge brain science, the latest discoveries in behavioral therapy, and case studies drawn from the thousands of kids and teens Bill and Ned have helped over the years to teach you how to set your child on the real road to success. As parents, we can only drive our kids so far. At some point, they will have to take the wheel and map out their own path. But there is a lot you can do before then to help them tackle the road ahead with resilience and imagination.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Stixrud, Ph.D. is a clinical neuropsychologist and a faculty member at Children's National Medical Center and George Washington University Medical School. He lectures widely on the adolescent brain, meditation, and the effects of stress, sleep deprivation, and technology overload on the brain. He has published several influential scientific articles and is on the board of the David Lynch Foundation.
Ned Johnson is the founder of PrepMatters, a tutoring service in Washington, DC, and the coauthor of Conquering the SAT: How Parents Can Help Teens Overcome the Pressure and Succeed. A sought-after speaker and teen coach for study skills, parent-teen dynamics, and anxiety management, his work has been featured on NPR, NewsHour, U.S. News & World Report, Time, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

The Most Stressful Thing in the Universe

Adam, a fifteen-year-old sophomore, walks from his family's cramped apartment in the projects on the South Side of Chicago to his underfunded public school every day. Last summer, his older brother was killed in a drive-by shooting while the two boys were hanging out on a street corner together. Now he finds it difficult to concentrate in school, has trouble retaining lessons, and is often sent to the principal's office for explosive behavior. He's not sleeping well and his grades, never very good, are slipping to the point where he may have to repeat a year.

Fifteen-year-old Zara lives in a multimillion-dollar house and attends a posh private school in the Washington, DC, area. Her parents hope she will make the cutoff for a National Merit Scholarship when she takes the PSAT this fall, so she fits in test prep between field hockey practice, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, and three to four hours of homework per night. Zara is getting good grades, but she's not sleeping well. She finds herself talking back to her parents and snapping at her friends, and she complains of frequent headaches.

We all know to worry about Adam: statistics suggest he has a tough road ahead. What we don't know is that we should worry about Zara, too. Chronic sleep deprivation and toxic stress during a critical phase of brain development are endangering her long-term mental and physical health. If you put a scan of Zara's brain next to one of Adam's, you'd see striking similarities, particularly in the parts of the brain involved in the stress response system.

In recent years, we've learned a lot about the damage athletes suffer from hitting their heads too much-either on soccer balls or on the 260-pound linebacker in their way. Today, we think about the long-term consequences of concussions: "Yeah, he looks okay now, but too many more of those and he's not going to remember his kids' names."

We think stress should be talked about in this way, too. Chronic stress wreaks havoc on the brain, especially on young brains. It's like trying to grow a plant in a too-small pot. As any casual gardener knows, doing so weakens the plant, with long-term consequences. Rates of stress-induced illnesses are extremely high in every demographic, and researchers are working furiously to uncover the reasons behind the rise in anxiety disorders, eating disorders, depression, binge drinking, and worrisome patterns of self-harm in young people. As Madeline Levine has made us aware, affluent children and teens are at particularly high risk for developing mental health problems such as anxiety, mood, and chemical use disorders. In fact, a recent survey showed that 80 percent of students in an affluent and competitive Silicon Valley high school reported moderate to severe levels of anxiety and 54 percent reported moderate to severe levels of depression. Depression is now the number one cause of disability worldwide. We think of chronic stress in children and teenagers as the societal equivalent of climate change-a problem that has been building over generations and will take considerable effort and a change of habits to overcome.

So what does a sense of control have to do with all of this? The answer is: everything. Quite simply, it is the antidote to stress. Stress is the unknown, the unwanted, and the feared. It's as minor as feeling unbalanced and as major as fighting for your life. Sonia Lupien at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress has a handy acronym for what makes life stressful-N.U.T.S.

Novelty Something you have not experienced before

Unpredictability Something you had no way of knowing would occur

Threat to the ego Your safety or competence as a person is called into question

Sense of control You feel you have little or no control over the situation

An early study that looked at stress in rats found that when a rat is given a wheel to turn that will stop it from receiving an electric shock, it happily turns the wheel and isn't very stressed. If the wheel is taken away, the rat experiences massive stress. If the wheel is then returned to the cage, the rat's stress levels are much lower, even if the wheel isn't actually attached to the shocking apparatus anymore. In humans, too, being able to push a button to reduce the likelihood of hearing a noxious sound will reduce their stress levels, even if the button has no real effect on the sound-and even if you don't push the button! It turns out that it's the sense of control that matters, even more so than what you actually do. If you have confidence that you can impact a situation, it will be less stressful. In contrast, a low sense of control may very well be the most stressful thing in the universe.

On some level, you probably know this. You may use it as a justification for cleaning up your desk before starting on a difficult task. Most people feel safer when they are driving than flying (when it should be the opposite) because they believe they are more in control. One of the reasons why traffic jams are so stressful is that there's nothing you can do about it.

You may also have experienced the power of control in relation to your kids. If your child is very sick or struggling and you feel there's nothing you can do about it, your stress level is likely to rise. Even less distressing events, like watching your teenager take the car out alone for the first time, or watching them perform at an athletic event or in a play, also cause stress. You're in the role of spectator, and there's little you can do beyond hope everything turns out okay.

Agency may be the one most important factor in human happiness and well-being. We all like to feel that we are in charge of our own destiny. The same thing goes for our kids. That's why two-year-olds will say things like "I do it myself!" and four-year-olds will insist "You are not the boss of me!" It's why we should let them do what they can for themselves, even if we're running late and it will take them twice as long. It's also why the surest way to get a picky five-year-old to eat his vegetables is to divide the plate in half and let him choose which half to eat. One of Ned's clients, Kara, was incredibly insightful about this: "When I was a kid, when my parents would say, 'You have to eat this or that food,' I hated it," she said. "So if they told me I had to eat something that I didn't want to, I'd throw it right back up on the table." Kara remarked that sleepaway camp was a highlight of her childhood because campers got to decide from a range of choices what to do all day, and what to eat. And given the freedom to act on her own, she ate responsibly.

Alas, sleepaway camp is not the world we live in. When she was around twelve or thirteen, Kara began to experience anxiety. "I think I first started having anxiety when people started telling me what to do," she said, "when I didn't feel like I was in control. And then when I switched schools and had to worry about fitting in and about what other people thought, I think that made it even worse. For me, feeling like I have a sense of control, that I am in charge of my own life, is so important. Even now, I like it when my parents give me choices. My friend's mom will say, 'Let's play this game for a while and then...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Viking
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735222517
ISBN 13 
9780735222519
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
VIKING
https://www.penguin.com/overview-vikingbooks/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY
New York
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Zeitfracht Medien GmbH
info-medien@zeitfracht.de

Ferdinand-Jühlke-Straße 7
Erfurt
99095
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780735222526: The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0735222525 ISBN 13:  9780735222526
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019
Softcover