Filled with fun activities, this manual will help readers of all ages deal with anxiety.
An interactive guide focuses on managing anxiety.
Stress can feel overwhelming, especially for children. But with parental support, kids can learn to manage their fears, coping with strong emotions in healthy ways. Aimed at children between the ages of 8 and 12, Dessy Marinova’s manual provides valuable insights into emotional wellness for preadolescents. Asserting that stress management starts with role modeling, the author opens with a discussion about parental resilience, encompassing topics such as self-care, self-appreciation, and validation of feelings. Next, readers are led on a parent-child journey through emotional management. To serve as guides on this educational adventure, the author introduces Aimie, Brightie, and Dooie. Representing the amygdala, the region of the brain that controls the fear response, Aimie is portrayed as a protective presence. But this role can sometimes result in misguided fear reactions. Brightie, who embodies regions of the cerebral cortex, plays a part in fostering the imagination. When “enchanted” by Aimie, Brightie may deliver mental projections of worrisome thoughts. Lastly, Dooie signifies the brain’s motor responses, located in the prefrontal cortex. When influenced by signals from Aimie and Brightie, Dooie may spark such behaviors as running away and hiding from new experiences. Depicted as cute cartoon friends, these characters will help children and adults recognize and manage emotional reactions, demystifying the responses people feel to new or challenging stimuli. Designed as a workbook, the volume provides activities that encourage kids and adults to explore their reactions to stressful scenarios in their lives. Offering techniques to cope with anxiety, playfully referred to as “brain snacks,” the author coaches readers on contextualizing, managing, and releasing stressful thoughts. Presenting illustrations and insights by the author’s young daughter, Lora Marinova, the guide thoughtfully balances science and accessibility. Yet one of the work’s most beneficial elements may be its framing of anxiety as a protective response. Describing anxiety as the product of a “Super-Protective-Aimie,” the book effectively destigmatizes fear, encouraging children and adults to see stress as a normal—even positive—hormonal response, which can result in happy outcomes.
Filled with fun activities, this manual will help readers of all ages deal with anxiety.Pub Date: June 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-912085-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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