A worthy program for solving children’s complex behavioral problems.
An occupational therapist offers a series of strategies for improving students’ functional behaviors.
“It’s impossible to effectively provide therapy, teach, or parent a student who is kicking you,” writes Pagano in his slim, interactive nonfiction debut. In the pages of his book, he looks at the challenges facing teachers, therapists, and parents who are dealing with children who throw tantrums, hit, bite, or simply refuse to pay attention. The author provides practical methods grouped under the structure of FAB: Functionally Alert Behavior strategies, designed to center children and ground them in their surroundings and in immediate, achievable tasks. “Predictable rules and procedures set a safe, reliable structure that enhances self-control,” Pagano notes. Drawing on his decades of experience working with kids, the author lays out a series of approaches based on things like sensory modulation or “pressure touch” strategies. These strategies emphasize building strong kinesthetic skills to boost visual perception and common abilities. The book includes interactive forms for use by both kids and their therapists as well as ample illustrations, from children’s drawings to uncredited photographs of the author interacting with students. The key innovation here is the implementation of what Pagano refers to as “physical self-regulation strategies,” which provide “active sensory-motor” tactics that can be fitted into the students’ daily routines in order to improve their day-to-day functional behaviors. Throughout the book, the specific procedural advice being offered is clearly stated, deftly detailed, and uniformly optimistic in tone. Parents, teachers, and caregivers will find a great deal of food for thought in these pages when it comes to positive reinforcement, mindfulness, and physical massaging as a way to focus children and help them gain the self-control that will avoid or restrain the acting-out behaviors that can make teaching them so challenging. The volume’s combination of practical and interactive material will make it exceptionally useful to any adults facing the problems that unruly kids can present.
A worthy program for solving children’s complex behavioral problems.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73282-190-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Pagano FAB Strategies, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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