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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER More than 1 million copies in print! The authors of No-Drama Discipline and The Yes Brain explain the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures in this pioneering, practical book.
“Simple, smart, and effective solutions to your child’s struggles.”—Harvey Karp, M.D.
In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson offer a revolutionary approach to child rearing with twelve key strategies that foster healthy brain development, leading to calmer, happier children. The authors explain—and make accessible—the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. The “upstairs brain,” which makes decisions and balances emotions, is under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain. No wonder kids throw tantrums, fight, or sulk in silence. By applying these discoveries to everyday parenting, you can turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child’s brain and foster vital growth.
Complete with age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles, The Whole-Brain Child shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.
“[A] useful child-rearing resource for the entire family . . . The authors include a fair amount of brain science, but they present it for both adult and child audiences.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Strategies for getting a youngster to chill out [with] compassion.”—The Washington Post
“This erudite, tender, and funny book is filled with fresh ideas based on the latest neuroscience research. I urge all parents who want kind, happy, and emotionally healthy kids to read The Whole-Brain Child. This is my new baby gift.”—Mary Pipher, Ph.D., author of Reviving Ophelia and The Shelter of Each Other
“Gives parents and teachers ideas to get all parts of a healthy child’s brain working together.”—Parent to Parent
Customers say
Customers find the book provides actionable strategies to help children develop emotional intelligence, resilience, and problem-solving skills. They find the information easy to understand and approachable. The book is helpful for working with people of all ages, starting with the 0-3 years category. It makes the strategies easy to remember and implement. The illustrations are great and clear, making them excellent for talking with kids about how their brains work. Customers say the strategies work well when put into practice.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Stephanie K. –
game changer for parenting
This book has changed the way I parent. I have two daughters, 1 and 6 years old. The oldest struggles with elevated levels of anxiety to the point where we decided to have her start chatting with a pediatric therapist to help her (and us) better navigate the tough moments. Her therapist recommends that all parents read this book. I am so thankful that I did. I not only understand more about my daughterâs brain and thought process and emotions, but I also understand more about myself, and how my handling of situations has projected my own anxiety onto her. The good news is that we can actually change our brains by forming new neural pathways, and itâs never too late to start. So you can take situations that normally upset your child (anxiety, fear, anger, violence, hyersilliness, nervousness, inability to focus â truly anything) and use these occurrences to help them form new neural pathways that in turn allow them to better cope with challenges. And itâs helped me in the same way. Iâve noticed I am better able to manage high-anxiety situations in general. This book does an amazing job at explaining just enough of the science to help the concepts make logical sense. For me, this makes them easier to remember and implement. After reading this book, I *get* it. And that makes all the difference in the world when you are in an emotional moment, struggling to best navigate not only your little oneâs feelings but also your own. Beyond the concepts, this book provides practical, easy to understand techniques. And darn it if they donât work. I noticed such a rapid response with my 6-year-old that I started using some of the approaches with my 1-year-old, and there was an immediate response with her as well. Getting such quick and positive feedback makes you excited to keep using the approaches. And itâs really set up to be as easy as possible. There is a helpful âHOW TO USE THIS BOOKâ section at the beginning, Iâve included some snippets in my photos. I think this book is a game changer for parenting, and I wish I had read it earlier. I recommend this to any parent, new or veteran.
Robert Morris –
How and why “the moments you are just trying to survive are actually opportunities to help your child to thrive”
As a father of three sons and a daughter and one of the grandfathers of their ten children, I can certainly understand what Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson have in mind while discussing moments of extreme stress for parents when their children become infuriating and intolerable. That is why I was intrigued by their explanation of the power of the “whole-brain approach” during all manner of touchpoints in parent-child relationships. That power is especially helpful in “the moments you are just trying to survive” because it creates “opportunities to help your child to thrive.” In fact, the 12 strategies that Siegal and Bryson recommend can be effective for almost [begin italics] anyone [end italics] who has direct and frequent contact with children, including teachers, coaches, and clergy as well as parents and other relatives.
In fact, with only minor modification, I think they can be beneficial to interactive relationships between and among adults, especially to those within a workplace.
“What’s great about this survive-and-thrive approach is that you don’t have to try to carve out special time to help your children thrive. You can use [begin italics] all [end italics] of the interactions you share – the stressful, angry ones as well as the miraculous, adorable ones – as opportunities to help them become the responsible, caring, capable people you want them to be. That’s what this book is about: using those everyday moments with your kids to help them reach their true potential.”
These are among the passages that caught my eye:
o Integration of Various Mental Domains (Pages 6-10)
o Get in the Flow: Navigating the Waters Between Chaos and Rigidity (10-13)
o Left Brain, Right Brain: An Introduction (15-16)
o Two Halves Make a Whole: Combining the Left and the Right (18-22)
o The Mental Staircase: Integrating the Upstairs and Downstairs Brain (38-41)
o Integrating Ourselves: Using Our Own Mental Staircase (64-65)
o Integrating Implicit and Explicit: Assembling the Puzzle Pieces of the Mind (76-86)
o Mindsight and the Wheel of Awareness (93-97)
o Integrating Ourselves: Looking at Our Own Wheel of Awareness (117-118)
o Laying the Groundwork for Connection: Creating Positive Mental Models (125-127)
o Cultivating a “Yes” State of Mind: Helping Kids Be Receptive to Relationships (129-133)
o Integrating Ourselves: Making Sense of Our Own Story (143-144)
Note: I urge you to check out another of Siegal’s books, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, in which Mindsight and the Wheel of Awareness are among the subjects discussed.
Readers will appreciate Siegal and Bryson’s skillful use of “What You Can Do” sections throughout their narrative that serve several purposes, notably focusing on key points while suggesting specific initiatives to apply what has been learned from the given material. For example, “What You Can Do: Helping Your Child Work from Both Sides of the Brain” (Pages 22-33). Dozens of eminently appropriate illustrations were created by Tuesday Mourning.
However, no brief commentary such as mine could possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of what Siegal and Bryson cover, with eloquence as well as rigor. I have elected not to list the twelve (12) strategies because I think they are best revealed in context, within the narrative. I do presume to suggest that those who are about to read this book begin and then frequently review later the “Whole-Brain Ages and Stages” material (on Pages 154-168) because it creates a wide and deep context, a frame of reference, for the abundance of information, insights, and recommendations in the six preceding chapters and Conclusion, “Bringing It All Together. ”
This book need not be read straight through (although I prefer that approach) but it should certainly be consulted frequently, hence the importance of “Whole-Brain Ages and Stages” and the Index as well as (I hope) passages of special importance that have been highlighted.
I also presume to suggest that Daniel Siegal and Tina Payne Bryson’s brilliant book will be most valuable to whole-brain readers. In it, they provide what they characterize in the Introduction as “an antidote to parenting and academic approaches that overemphasize achievement and perfection at any cost.” It is imperative that everyone involved directly (and even indirectly) with the development if children “understand some basics about the young brain that [they] are helping to grow and develop.”
CTZ –
Great book about growing up kids
Great book about bringing up children. I bought copies for my adult kids after I read it.
Tania –
The scientific yet simple approach of the authors has helped me understand how my children’s brains are developed and gave me very useful strategies to help them learn how to tune their own experiences.
The best part is that the same information helps me to become a better person, more in touch with my thoughts and feelings, and more aware of why I behave in a certain way in specific situations.
ãã«ãã£ã –
This is an awesome book! It’s an easy, I read it all in two days. The author explains how the brain works in a very easy to understand way and gives many examples and advice on how to use it in every day life with your kids. I got so many tools to help me deal with my kid and help them be more successful and content in the future. Even if you don’t have kids I still think that this book is a good read. Most things I found do not only apply to kids, but also to adults.
Jared Hylian –
Aún que creas no necesitar ayuda en como criar a tu hijo, es muy buena lectura para ver qué hacer para mejorar la relación con tu hijo y entenderlo mejor.
hossein –
not informing at all
Victoria –
Loved this book, helped me a lot in my parenting approaches.