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 enlarge | Authors: Bruce Perry, Maia Szalavitz
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $9.03
You Save: $6.92 (43%)
New (36) Used (6) from $9.00
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 7120
Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0465056539
Dewey Decimal Number: 150
EAN: 9780465056538
ASIN: 0465056539
Publication Date: December 24, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: A20081202201048W
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 13
Well written, easy to understand March 27, 2008
Diane L. (NJ)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I work in the child abuse field and I also adopted a traumatized child. This book provides honest and practical information about working with and living with a child who has been traumatized. The author maintained a sense of humor and encourages this in anyone reading the book. Some of the stories were incredibly sad. Many were filled with terror and loss of hope. However, in almost every situation, he was able to find hope for the child where none had been before.
I have shared this book with others at my place of work. The overwhelming review has been the same from all. Well done, must read for anyone in the field or thinking of becoming a foster parent or adoptive parent for a severely traumatized child.
Hopeful book I won't quickly forget March 3, 2008
Dee
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This was a book I had a hard time putting down. The author is obviously highly intelligent and compassionate. After reading it, I want to read more by him, but it appears only articles--no books--are available. The book, without going into too much medicalese, explains how the brain is affected by trauma. The true life stories coupled with neurological explanations offer hope to those who have been traumatized and those who would understand them. I was astonished by the last chapter--or maybe it was one of the last?--that presented, for me, a novel way of influencing a child's peer group.
Every parent should read this book March 2, 2008
Jennifer M. Brown (OXLEY., Vic. Australia)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Anyone working with traumatized and abused children will gain insight and knowledge in parenting in a positive way. Dr Bruce Perry is a pioneer in the child psychiatry field of the link between early childhood nurturing (or lack of) experiences and brain development. As a foster parent I found this book extremely informative and helpful, and would recommend it to all who care for children.
 Very exciting February 27, 2008
Tundra Girl (Bethel AK)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have told numerous people about this book already. It is a great book with insight into what is necessary to be human in this mixed-up world. It is a sign of hope and offers an incredible new way of thinking about children, their environment and their brain. Dr. Perry has developed a new therapy "Neurosequential Model (NMT)" that offers a challenge to the traditional modes of therapy used by social workers, psychologists, etc. Taking both the environment AND the brain (nature and nurture) into consideration, he explains how he has attempted to re-train the brains of children who have faced severe trauma - with amazing results. He reminds us that change IS possible and that your history does not necessarily have to be your future! In the beginning, the book is a bit heavy on the science side of things (in order to give an intro to how the brain works) -which was a turn-off for me. However, after reading a few chapters it is easy to understand why the beginning heaviness is necessary to understand the rest of the book. This is an exciting time to be watching the field of trauma. Dr. Perry's work is revolutionary and the time has come for us to rethink how we treat trauma and other 'diagnosable' issues.
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and I really could understand how the treatments in this book (and Dr. Perry's therapy) could work on children with all types of diagnoses - not just trauma. Once we start thinking about how the brain is involved with various diagnoses and how to treat THAT, the possibilities seem almost endless... I just wish I could learn more about it and make it available to the clients I am working with in rural Alaska! Even if you are not in this field, this book is important and a great educator on 'what makes us the way we are' and how to think about changing that.
Drama in the Service of Social Restructuring February 19, 2008
Rodger Garrett (Loma Linda, CA USA)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Erik Erikson's -Childhood and Society-. Don Winnicott's -The Child, The Family and The Outside World-. Alice Miller's -For Your Own Good-. Three books about growing up in Western Culture. Three books the average guy could understand. Three watersheds.
This could be -- and -should- be -- the fourth.
I have been reading Perry's professional work for a decade. Along with Daniel Stern (-The Motherhood Constellation-) and Alan Schore (-Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self-), he stands with the giants of early life neurobiology, infant-mother bonding and socialization in the millennial era. For me, his work harks back an entire century to the simple and forthright illuminations of the recently rediscovered Pierre Janet.
I may routinely recommend the mass market work of people like Pia Mellody, Claudia Black and Scott Peck in -their- heydays; usefully dramatic expositions of vital concepts tend to flip my switch. This thing flipped it over, and over, and over again. A brief sample may help others to understand why:
"For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support... People without any relationships were believed to be as healthy as those who had many. These ideas contradict the fundamental biology of the human species: we are social mammals and could never have survived without deeply interconnected and interdependent human contact.
"The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.
"In order for a child to become kind, giving and empathetic, he needs to be treated that way. Punishment can't create or model those qualities. Although we do need to set limits, if we want our children to behave well, we have to treat them well."
Perry buttresses his case with presentation after presentation from casework involving neglected, invalidated, brainwashed, ignored and hoodwinked young humans "raised" in extremist religious cults, Eastern European orphanages, broken chromosome backwaters and even animal cages. He shows us how children raised in seemingly "normal" homes can have every reason to be as confused and disoriented as his more obvious worst-case-scenarios. And he shows us how developmentally appropriate re-parenting (more or less the fundament of the Adult Children of Alcoholics movement) can and will produce near miracles.
Social impact seems to require drama. Miller's work in the '80s crashed through the gates of denial on child abuse after decades of factually solid but less dramatic publication. Perry's first-hand experience with the surviving children of the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, and the tragically mistaken "satanic cult" furball in rural Gilmer, Texas, make the most of memorable headlines from recent years.
Drama, however, is only a means to an end. The message is what matters.
And the message is simply -this-: The love of the mother is not merely significant, it is the Single Most Important Learning Experience in human life. Those who miss it, or suffer through some twisted version of it like Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy or parenting by those who experienced none of their own, are doomed to all the shattered trust, push-pull autonomy, corrupted initiative, shipwrecked identity and incapacity for intimacy Erikson promised us a half century ago.
If there is a potential fault here, it is that Perry's illustrations -are- both extreme and dramatic. Many may fail to see that less extreme and dramatic results of Miller's "poisonous pedagogy," Diana Baumrind's "permissive-abandoning parenting" and John Bowlby's "anxious attachment" are rapidly becoming our societal norms.
As Perry points out, "A person born in 1905 had only a one-percent chance of suffering depression by the age of seventy-five, but by their twenty-fourth birthday, six percent of those born in 1955 had an episode of serious depression. Other studies indicate that teen depression rates have increased by an incredible factor of ten in recent decades."
It is clear to those of us who work with these people that Janet was on top of it all a century ago. Few paid attention to his revelations about the "normal practice of destroying our children and our society" then. Let us hope more will pay attention now.
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