By Tamar E. Chansky, Ph.D.; 321 pages. Subtitle: Powerful, Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility, and Happiness.
According to this friendly guide from a child psychologist, it's not negative thoughts that are the problem for some kids so much as the scope of those thoughts -- they believe every failure means they'll never succeed, every rejection means they'll never have another friend, every hard day means they're doomed to despair for eternity. Chansky offers specific exercises to get that bad voice to quiet down, and make your family life upbeat, too.
- Offers specific exercises to do with your child to encourage resilience.
- Stresses the need to help kids handle negativity, rather than softening all blows.
- Gives guidelines for when professional help is needed.
- Writing style is friendly and easy to read.
- Scripts help you know just what to say when talking with your child.
- The book seems longer and more detailed than it needs to be.
- Since "negative thinking" is a looser concept than anxiety or OCD, the book sometimes lacks focus.
- Some of the remedies sound easier said than done.
- Chapter 1: Understanding Negative Thinking: Wired to Quit (Too Soon)
- Chapter 2: Changing Your Child's Mind: Talking Back to the Negative Brain
- Chapter 3: Weathering the Storm of Big, Negative Feelings: Inviting Them In, Working Them Out
- Chapter 4: Shining the Light on Your Child's Unique Abilities: Finding and Applying Your Child's Strengths
- Chapter 5: Going From the "No" to the "Know": The Master Plan for Overcoming Negative Thinking
- Chapter 6: When Negativity Takes Hold: Does My Child Need Professional Help?
- Chapter 7: Losing, Failure, and Jealousy (Oh My!): Walking Your Child Compassionately Through the "Givens" of Life
- Chapter 8: The Parents' Role: Teaching Without Getting Tangled Up: How Not to Turn One Negative Person Into Two
- Chapter 9: Resilience to Go and Happiness to Stay
Chapter 10: Everyday Optimism - Chapter 11: Lighting Up the Future: Keeping Your Child on Track for the Long Run
We're no stranger to negative thinking in my house. I have a daughter who has suffered anxiety over the slings and arrows of teen-dom, and Chansky's book Freeing Your Child From Anxiety was one of the resources that helped me help her get a grip on that. The kind of anxiety that made her throw up before going to school and cry at the drop of a hat is gone, but there are still those days when a bad marching band practice makes her certain that everybody hates her and she can never show her face again.
That's the kind of outsized negative thinking that Chansky addresses in this new book, and the techniques are similar: Separate the thought from the child, give that voice a name like "Mr. Meany," and analyze the difference between that troublemaker's statements and the objective truth. Not telling your child it's ridiculous to worry, not making everything better so he doesn't feel bad, just gifting your kid with the ability to analyze and recover.
And because the worry apple often doesn't fall far from the tree, there's also help here for analyzing your own negative thought habits, something I could probably use after I cried myself to sleep the other night because my daughter suffered a rejection. It's easy for everybody to get caught up in the gloom-and-dooms.
On a negative note, the book, though engaging, goes on longer than needed and loses focus along the way. Maybe because "negative thinking" is a general concept, it's easy to slide from help for kids with a serious negativity problem to more general ideas on adjusting attitudes and family habits. While it's all individually useful, it's hard to zoom in on what you need, and easy to lose attention if you've got a lot going on ... like a sad child, or a teary day.
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