The Bottom Line
By Richard Lavoie; 394 pages. Subtitle: Helping the Child with Learning Disabilities Find Social Success
"It's So Much Work to Be Your Friend"? It's so much work to read this book! Both exhaustive and exhausting, the nearly 400-page volume gives lots of good reasons why your child may have trouble making and keeping friends. Understanding is always a good thing, and you'll gain that here. But the solutions leave something to be desired.
- Looks at every angle of social-skills difficulty for children with learning disabilities
- Gives parents a thorough understanding of why their child acts like that
- Includes ADHD behaviors in its look at social-skills challenges
- Offers many examples to help reader see things through child's eyes
- Has good background information on how friendships develop and change at different ages
- Way longer than it has to be
- If you read many parenting books, this may all be old ground
- Long chapters make for slow reading
- Much better at describing problems than offering realistic solutions
- Written more from a teacher's perspective than a parent's
Description
- Chapter 1: Children with Learning Disorders are Wired Differently: It's All in Their Heads
- Chapter 2: Anxiety: A Cause and Consequence of Social Isolation
- Chapter 3: Language Difficulties: Getting and Giving the Message
- Chapter 4: Paralinguistics: Words Carry the Message, Body Language Carries the Emotion
- Chapter 5: Attention Deficit Disorder: The Social Lives of the Unhappy Wanderers
- Chapter 6: Enhancing Organizational Skills
Chapter 7: Siblings and Other Strangers - Chapter 8: Playdates: The Social Coin of the Realm
Chapter 9: Bullies, Victims, and Spectators - Chapter 10: Mastering the Hidden Curriculum of School: The Unwritten, Unspoken Rules
- Chapter 11: Teacher-Pleasing Behaviors: Polishing the Apple
- Chap. 12: Appropriate Social Skills in Public Places
Chap. 13: Meeting, Making & Keeping Friends
Guide Review - Book Review: It's So Much Work to Be Your Friend
It's hard for parents to watch their children struggle socially. Almost more than academic success, we want our kids to have friends, to like and be liked, to avoid the pitfalls of bullying and harassment and isolation. When that goal seems heartbreakingly hard to reach, parents are put in the frustrating position of wanting to fix it and knowing that anything they do will likely break it even more.
"It's So Much Work to Be Your Friend" will certainly give you a lot more information about the problem. It's packed with facts on the forming of friendships, the development of social skills, the unspoken language of vocal tone and body position. I was fascinated to learn about "Zero Order Social Skills," those abilities that are so expected that you don't get credit for having them, only debits for missing them; and about the Hidden Curriculum at schools, the social mores that some kids seem to pick up through osmosis. I learned a lot, but goodness, there was such a lot to learn. Maybe this is how my learning-disabled teen feels when she struggles through her schoolbooks.
And what do we do with all that info? The solutions offered look good on paper, but I feel strongly that if I tried them with my daughter, she would give me that deer-in-the-headlights look. If you've used these tecniques with your child and had success, please stop by the forum and tell me about it. To this weary parent, this hefty volume seems like lots of talk, not much action.
