Smart But Scattered, Second Edition (the Revolutionary Executive Skills Approach To Helping Kids Reach Their Potential)

By (author) Dawson Peg; By (author) Guare Richard; By (author) Guare Colin
Short description/annotation:
This encouraging guide is grounded in research on the crucial brain-based skills that 4- to 13-year-olds need to get organized, stay focused, and control their impulses and emotions.
Description:

All kids occasionally space out, get sidetracked, run out of time, or explode in frustration--but some do it much more often than others. If you have a “smart but scattered” child, take heart. This encouraging guide is grounded in research on the crucial brain-based skills that 4- to 13-year-olds need to get organized, stay focused, and control their impulses and emotions. The expert authors guide you to identify your child''s executive strengths and weaknesses, boost skills that are lacking, fix everyday routines that don''t work, and reduce everyone''s stress. Including new research, new and updated vignettes, and "A Good Place to Start" suggestions for each skill, the revised and updated second edition features a new chapter on technology and a greatly expanded school chapter. Helpful practical tools can be downloaded and printed.

See also the authors'' Smart but Scattered Teens, Smart but Scattered--and Stalled (with a focus on emerging adults), and The Smart but Scattered Guide to Success (with a focus on adults).

Table of contents:

Introduction
I. What Makes Your Child Smart but Scattered
1. How Did Such a Smart Kid End Up So Scattered?
2. Identifying Your Child’s Executive Skill Strengths and Challenges
3. How Your Own Executive Skill Strengths and Challenges Matter
II. Laying a Foundation That Can Help
4. Nine Principles for Improving Your Child’s Executive Skills
5. Modifying the Environment: A Is for Antecedent
6. Teaching Executive Skills Directly: B Is for Behavior
7. Motivating Your Child to Learn and Use Executive Skills: C Is for Consequence
III. Putting It All Together
8. Advance Organizer
9. Ready-Made Plans for Teaching Your Child to Complete Daily Routines
10. Building Response Inhibition
11. Enhancing Working Memory
12. Improving Emotional Control
13. Encouraging Flexibility
14. Strengthening Sustained Attention
15. Teaching Task Initiation
16. Promoting, Planning, and Prioritizing
17. Fostering Organization
18. Instilling Time Management
19. Increasing Goal-Directed Persistence
20. Cultivating Metacognition
21. When What You Do Is Not Enough
22. A Brief Look at Technology
23. The Role of Schools in Executive Skill Development
Parting Thoughts
Resources
Index

Review quote:

"A revolutionary guide for parents. The second edition offers fresh perspectives on important issues like the impact of technology on developing minds. Smart but Scattered gives parents skills and confidence to enhance their child''s success--with strategies that take just 5 to 10 minutes a day."--Julie Gettman, PhD, NCSP, ABSNP, Executive Director, School Neuropsychology Institute

"As a pediatric neuropsychologist, I have recommended Smart but Scattered to hundreds--if not thousands--of parents. I didn’t think it was possible to improve on a classic, but the authors have done just that! With deep insight and empathy, the book provides abundant ideas and activities to increase executive function skills. Information about technology--a distraction for most ''scattered'' kids--is a wonderful addition to the second edition. I love this book."--Ellen Braaten, PhD, author of Bright Kids Who Can''t Keep Up

"The second edition improves on the original masterpiece! The authors empower you to foster your child''s self-awareness and growth--even if executive skills ar