IN THIS AGE OF
ATTENTION, KIDS NEED FOCUS MORE THAN KNOWLEDGE
Book by Education
Pioneer Says Kids CAN Learn the Core Executive Function Skills That Focus
Requires and Empowers Parents to Teach These Skills
Does your child have trouble staying focused,
breaking down directions, staying organized or managing their time?
Does this leave you worrying that they won’t be very successful running their
own lives when it’s time to leave for college?
So many children today see their unique
strengths and talents stymied by a lack of focus.
And in this Age of Attention -- the successor
to the Information Age -- kids are struggling more than ever before to make the
best use of the two most precious commodities they have: time and attention.
Naturally, parents worry: “Is my kid gonna be
okay?”
Enter Massachusetts Distinguished Educator
Michael Delman, whose new book, “Your Kid's Gonna Be Okay:
Building the Executive Function Skills Your Child Needs in the Age of Attention”, alleviates this anxiety by explaining that kids can learn the core executive
function skills they need, and empowering parents to teach them these skills.
Drawing on Delman’s thirty-plus years of
experience working with children, including as co-founder and past principal of
the McAuliffe Regional Charter Public School in Framingham, Massachusetts, Your Kid’s Gonna Be Okay untangles
several of the most important obstacles to children’s growth, confidence, and
success and offers actionable solutions for helping them surmount these.
Whether your children are typical learners or
have specific learning challenges, such as ADHD or dyslexia, the book will help
parents to help them by:
- Explaining the real underpinnings of motivation.
- Exploring how people change and how we can help facilitate that change in our children.
- Showing how we can help our children manage their anxiety and how we can learn to manage our own worries about them.
- Addressing how to achieve the optimal state of peak performance where our children are sufficiently motivated without being held back by fear of failure.
- Examining “attention” as a skill-set.
- Shedding light on the higher-level, more complex Executive Function skills such as prioritizing, planning, time management, and organization.
- Exploring how to learn and improve from experience.
Filled with over 60 guided exercises and tested
examples to help you understand how children learn and grow, Your Kid’s Gonna Be Okay adds
relevant tools to your parenting repertoire, and shows you the skills you need
to offer support in a way your child will appreciate rather than resent.
Importantly, Your
Kid’s Gonna Be Okay offers invaluable wisdom and tools to help
parents stay calm.
Other
topics the book addresses include:
- Why trying their hardest can work against your kids.
- Why you should STOP trying to motivate your child.
- The benefits of emotional, not academic support, in helping your kids succeed in school.
- Three expectations to let go of to help your kids focus.
- How to help your child build the habit of attention.
- The secret to winning a homework argument with your child: don’t argue.
Praise for Your Kid’s Gonna Be Okay
"Delman draws on deep
veins of experience—as a parent, teacher, and executive function coach—to
produce a book that captures both the daily challenge of parenting and his
optimistic view that most kids turn out okay. Written with humor and
compassion, he masterfully uses personal stories to bring his advice and
strategies to life. Enjoy the book for the stories and the humor—but bookmark
the strategies, because you’ll want to access them quickly as teachable moments
arise and beg for a creative response" -- Peg Dawson, Ed.D., co-author of Smart But Scattered
"Finally, a book that
tackles both the emotional and cognitive issues of executive functioning! This
book offers the extraordinary gift of knowledge, wisdom, and empathy for
parents and educators who are struggling to understand the child with executive
function weaknesses. Michael Delman – who has years of experience
motivating children to achieve their best – has crafted a masterful resource
that deconstructs the complex issues in executive function skills. It provides
a wonderful roadmap for parents seeking answers by explaining the unique way
children may engage in the world while giving practical solutions to overcome
these challenges." -- Ellen Braaten, Ph.D., co-author of Bright Kids Who Can't Keep Up
"Delman’s highly
personalized writing and storytelling explains in remarkably accessible terms
and with enlightening anecdotes, how to foster these essential neurocognitive
skills in children and adolescents as they face the increasingly demanding
“curriculum” of their daily lives. Without a doubt, teaching kids these
Executive Function skills is equivalent to giving them the tools they need in
their efforts to meet the demands of their teachers and parents. This book
gives adults the tools they need to empower children and adolescents to meet
their “bosses’” expectations." -- David Gleason, Psy.D., author of At What Cost? Defending Adolescent
Development in Fiercely Competitive Schools
About Michael Delman
Massachusetts Distinguished
Educator Michael Delman is founder and CEO of Beyond BookSmart, the first
organization to apply Dr. James Prochaska’s Transtheoretical Model of Change to
help students improve academic performance. He is the author of Your Kid’s Gonna Be Okay
(2018), distilling years of wisdom on the executive function skills children
need in the age of attention. As an educator since 1991, Michael’s primary
mission is to make learning relevant and to help young people find capacities
in themselves that they don’t know they have. Co-founder of the McAuliffe
Regional Charter Public School in Framingham, Massachusetts, a middle school in
its 15th year of operation teaching over 350 students through the Expeditionary
Learning Outward Bound school model, Michael is an avid researcher and
developer of tools and strategies to help students become more effective. He
holds a B.A. in Public Policy from Brown University, and an M. Ed. in Middle School Education from Lesley
University.
Title: Your Kid’s Gonna Be Okay: Building the
Executive Function Skills Your Child Needs in the Age of Attention
Author: Michael Delman
Hardcover: 238 pages
Publisher: BeyondBookSmart, LLC
Release Date: June 15, 2018
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1732034907
ISBN-13: 978-1732034907
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