Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life

There’s no such thing as a bad kid. That’s what a lifetime of experience has taught Dr. Stuart Shanker. No matter how difficult, out of control, distracted, or exhausted a child might seem, there’s a way forward: self-regulation. Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, this radical new technique allows children and the adults who care for them to regain their composure and peace of mind.
 
Self-Reg is a groundbreaking book that presents an entirely new understanding of your child’s emotions and behavior and a practical guide for parents to help their kids engage calmly and successfully in learning and life. Grounded in decades of research and working with children and parents by Dr. Shanker, Self-Reg realigns the power of the parent-child relationship for positive change. Self-regulation is the nervous system’s way of responding to stress. We are seeing a generation of children and teens with excessively high levels of stress, and, as a result, an explosion of emotional, social, learning, behavior, and physical health problems. But few parents recognize the “hidden stressors” that their children are struggling with: physiological as well as social and emotional. An entrenched view of child rearing sees our children as lacking self-control or willpower, but the real basis for these problems lies in excessive stress.
 
Self-regulation can dramatically improve a child’s mood, attention, and concentration. It can help children to feel empathy, and to cultivate the sorts of virtues that most parents know are vital for their child’s long-term wellbeing. Self-regulation brings about profound and lasting transformation that continues throughout life. Dr. Shanker translates decades of his findings from working with children into practical, prescriptive advice for parents, giving them concrete ways to develop their self-regulation skills and teach their children to do the same and engage successfully with life for optimal learning, social, and emotional growth.

• Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child
• Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children's Behavioral Challenges
• A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play
• Explosive Child, The: A New Approach For Understanding And Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children
• Social and Emotional Development in Early Intervention
• ACT for Adolescents: Treating Teens and Adolescents in Individual and Group Therapy
• Engaging Autism: Using the Floortime Approach to Help Children Relate, Communicate, and Think (A Merloyd Lawrence Book)
• DBT® Skills in Schools: Skills Training for Emotional Problem Solving for Adolescents (DBT STEPS-A) (The Guilford Practical Intervention in the Schools Series)
• Self-Regulation Interventions and Strategies: Keeping the Body, Mind & Emotions on Task in Children with Autism, ADHD or Sensory Disorders
• The Trauma-Informed School: A Step-by-Step Implementation Guide for Administrators and School Personnel