Listening to Fear : Helping Kids Cope, from Nightmares to the Nightly News

by Marans, Steven , Ph.D.

• ISBN13: 9780805076042
• ISBN10: 0805076042
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-01-10
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Summary

Learn how to read the behavioral language of fear and talk through your child's anxieties Adults often have trouble understanding and addressing the sources of their children's fears. InListening to Fear, Dr. Steven Marans shares the techniques for easing distress that he has developed for children of all ages in his work as the director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence at Yale University. His advice is based on three steps parents must take before they can talk effectively with their children. First, adults must begin to work through their own fears. Second, parents need to set aside their ideas about what their children are feeling and learn from the children themselves. Third, Marans's experience has shown that children and adolescents communicate their unease in actions more than in words, so adults must learn to interpret this behavioral language. Listening to Fearalso offers specific, pragmatic tactics for actually speaking with kids, organized by age group and proven in Marans's research. These methods include ways to - ask about the concerns and worries of your child's friends - think through the messages behind your child's questions before answering - reassure your child with facts, but not too many Listening to Fearis an indispensable guide for parents and for children anxious about an ever-threatenting world.

Author Biography

Steven Marans, Ph.D., is Harris Associate Professor of Child Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, where he is also the director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. This is his first book.

Table of Contents

“Listening to Fear is timely, accessible, and very helpful. Steven Marans has drawn on his personal and professional experience and broad-based expertise to help us help our children and ourselves with the unique challenges of danger and terror in this age.”
--James P. Comer, M.D., Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry, Yale Child Study Center and associate dean, Yale University School of Medicine, author of Leave No Child Behind

“Steven Marans insightful and exquisitely sensitive book provides direction and answers to help parents support children. His carefully crafted narratives illustrating how children of different ages experience trauma and ways that parents can help them are important tools for parents. Dr. Marans’s book is an invaluable resource to help parents and other adults talk to and support children living with fear and uncertainty.”
--Joy D. Osofsky, Ph.D., Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Public Health, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center

"The title of Listening to Fear is unusually apt, but then Marans is an unusually gifted listener. He is also a rare mix of skilled observer and doer, unafraid of articulating the fears of our youngest citizens. This is precisely why this book is so welcome here and now. In a time when fear is more widely exploited then explained, this book is a Rosetta stone. It uses several languages—narrative, analytic, occasionally political—to promote understanding and better approaches to the relationships between ordinary, if powerful, childhood fears and horrific societal ones. So often when parents turn to experts for help with deeply worrisome and pervasive issues like those addressed in Listening to Fear, they are disappointed. Not this time. Your children, and your abiding concerns for them are in this book."
--Kyle Pruett, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Nursing, Yale University School of Medicine, author of Me, Myself and I