Why Smart Kids Worry
And What Parents Can Do to Help
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Unlock the secrets behind your child’s worries.
Is your bright child overwhelmed by worries that seem beyond their years? Do questions about global issues or personal anxieties keep them up at night? "Why Smart Kids Worry" offers a compassionate roadmap to understanding and supporting your child's unique emotional landscape.
Licensed Professional Counselor and Registered Play Therapist Allison Edwards delves into the intricate relationship between intelligence and anxiety in children. Drawing from her extensive experience, she provides parents with actionable strategies to help their children navigate the challenges of growing up smart and sensitive.
“Therapist Edwards brings profound insight into the minds of gifted, anxious children in this parent-friendly handbook.” — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
In this insightful guide, you'll discover:
• The Link Between Intelligence and Anxiety: Understand why intellectually advanced children are more prone to excessive worrying.
• 15 Practical Tools: Equip yourself with effective techniques to help your child manage their fears and build resilience.
• Real-Life Scenarios: Learn how to address tough questions about topics like death, natural disasters, and global events in an age-appropriate manner.
• Strategies for Everyday Challenges: Gain insights into managing perfectionism, overthinking, and high expectations that often accompany giftedness.
Whether your child struggles with school stress, social fears, or perfectionism, Why Smart Kids Worry gives you the tools to help them feel safe, understood, and empowered.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Therapist Edwards brings profound insight into the minds of gifted, anxious children in this parent-friendly handbook which combines explanations for odd behaviors with practical tools for helping children navigate their fears, learn self-soothing techniques, and learn to function in a scary world. She explains the asynchronous development of smart kids, in which intellectual ability exceeds physical age, while emotional maturity tracks physical age or lags behind it, leaving children who take a concrete, literal understanding of what they see, hear, and learn, and expand it through higher-level thought processes into fears about topics like death, finances, terrorism, and natural disasters. She advises parents to direct their children away from the triggers of tough topics in family discussions and from the media, giving them only the information that directly affects them, and redirecting their craving for intellectual stimulation into less emotionally charged projects. Fifteen tools for parents and children to use together like "Square Breathing," "Worry Time," and "Naming the Anxiety," which include explanations of when to use the tool, why it works, how to implement it, and what to expect in response offer practical approaches to teaching coping skills and emotional competence, and will work well for any child with anxiety. Parents will be comforted by Edwards's analysis, which frames children's worrying as a manageable challenge.
