Michael Thompson (2)Reseñas

It’s a lot on how to allow your boy to express his feelings, I thought it will be more about controlling his emotions 😉
CM my role model at the office recommended it to me. Nice read though

A must read for any parent of boys. As one myself, I'm committed to helping our son cultivate a healthy emotional life. Raising Cain provides insight into doing just that.

Ein Strudel aus Emotionen und unkontrollierter Wut bestimmt das Leben der meisten heranwachsenden Jungen und ihrer Eltern vom Kindergarten bis zum Abitur. Dabei fehlt den Jugendlichen lediglich das Vokabular, ihren Gefühlen und ihrem Schmerz Ausdruck zu verleihen. Oft sind sie impulsiv oder werden verletzend, schwanken zwischen Trauer, Zorn und Aggression und bemerken nicht, wie sie auf andere wirken. Die Eltern sind hilflos, verlieren den Kontakt zu ihren Söhnen, die sie lieben, und haben doch nicht die Kraft, sie vor sich selbst zu schützen. Die Autoren Kindlon und Thompson zeigen, wie Söhnen die gefühlsmäßige Unterstützung gegeben werden kann, die sie so dringend brauchen, um die Zeit der Adoleszenz zu überstehen und als ganze, in sich ruhende Männer daraus hervorzugehen, in enger Verbindung zu ihren Eltern, Familien und Freunden. Ihr Buch ist ein Wegweiser für alle Eltern, die bei der Erziehung ihrer Söhne Hilfe suchen und damit das Pendant zu Mary Piphers 'Pubertätskrisen junger Mädchen'.

Essential reading for parents of boys and for all educators IMO.

Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children by Michael Thompson, PH. D. and Catherine O’Neill Grace. Library section 8 I: Life Skills: K-12. Friendship plays a crucial, but often hidden, role in the lives of children. Friendship begins at birth with the infant’s first friend, mother, then father, care givers, relatives, and finally those outside the family group. Toddlers first play independently, side by side. Eventually preschoolers learn to play together. Kids develop friendships with children with whom they get along or admire. These friendships can be deep and enduring. As children grow their friendships become more complex because they encounter emotion, jealousy, cruelty, loyalty, and betrayal as friendships wax and wane.
The authors use as examples particular children in local day care centers to illustrate how friendships develop, providing parents and other readers with a deeper understanding of the motives and meanings of social behavior among children. You will find discussions about “the power of the group” versus independence, the difference between friendship and popularity, how friendships differ by gender, whether all kids need a best friend, how kids manage conflict, betrayal and reconciliation, tools of dominance, why cliques form and what can be done about them.
Most poignant for me was the discussion about how children group themselves – some have many friends, some have a few friends, some have just one friend, and some have none. My heart goes out to the children who don’t have the social skills to make even a single friend, who don’t seem to fit anywhere, who are teased, made fun of, bullied, avoided like the plaque, or perhaps worst of all, totally ignored. We all know such children whether they be geeks, nerds, artsies, eccentrics, whether they have varying sexual orientations, or are of a different race of creed. Thompson tells how schools and teachers have developed teaching plans and methods to teach kindness, inclusion, respect, and courtesy. These tools can be easily adapted for use by anyone who works with children – in public school, Sunday School, or organizations like Scouts or 4-H, to make sure all kids are accepted just as they are, are included, find at least one friend in the group, and given encouragement and recognition by the teacher and the entire group. There is much parents, teachers and leaders of children can do to cut down on bullying, teasing and ostracization. You will find those tools in this book.
As parents we can’t help but inject our own residual feelings of hurt, anger, frustration, and ostracization from our own childhood into our children’s friendship dilemmas. The pain of ostracization can return as we ache for our own children’s friendship ups and downs. My mother used to tell me stories about a particular girl who made her life miserable as an adolescent. This made me feel less alone in my social struggles. Sadly, we also know and try to deal with adults who never learned the social skills to make and keep friends, perhaps due to childhood dysfunctional family relationships or conditions like autism or Asperger’s syndrome. They clash with others over trivial things, have emotional explosions inappropriate for the social situation, or drift along, always on the edges of the group, avoided by others.
This is a very interesting, readable book about the social behaviors of children. If you are a parent or teacher, or if you work with children as a den mother, advisor, or leader, you definitely need to read this book in order to understand the underlying meanings of social behaviors among children. Find out the feelings that are REALLY going on under the surface interactions of your class or group of kids. There is a LOT going on, and there is much you can do to model kindness, inclusion, and friendship for those children in your care.

great insight into children's social lives.

Sort of skipped around, knowing that I'll be coming back to this book as Z grows older.

I didn't order this book to read about kids' summer camps, per se. I ordered this book because I know I have a tendency to be an overprotective parent who wants to shelter my child from everything bad. I hoped it would be a good "counter viewpoint" for me, and it was. Definitely food for thought...

We may want to protect our children from everything and keep them close to us. However, this book - through the author's extensive study of children at summer camp - helps parents to see that there is a balance to be struck. When children are away from their parents, even when they are homesick, they grow and learn in ways that they can never do under their parents watchful eye.

The book provides a list of skills that children can only learn when they are away from home - skills parents alone cannot teach them. There are many case studies of children at camp and their personal experiences. There are suggestions for helping children conquer homesickness, and tips for parents who are missing their children when they are apart.

This was an interesting book, and a good reminder for parents who have to strike a difficult balance - between holding their children close and learning how to let go at the right times.

(I received this book via Amazon's Vine Program.)½

I’ve just finished Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys, by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. I started off loving it and singing its praises to everyone I met, but it got progressively more difficult to get through....

read my whole review at: http://sanctimommy.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/raising-cain/

Raising Cain is one of a number of books that address the challenges of raising boys, but it stands out among them by eschewing both the glib Gender War rhetoric and the underlying political or theological agendas that often characterize other books on this topic. Instead, it is both deeply insightful and full of compassion for the emotional lives of boys and men. Rather than offering a point-by-point program, the authors focus on various goals for raising boys, and make some suggestions on how we can accomplish them. It devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between fathers and sons, and a recurrent theme of the book is finding ways to effectively close the emotional distance between ourselves and our sons.

This book addresses issues for boys of all ages, and also discusses difficult topics such as depression, drug use and violence among boys. Finally, all fathers were sons at one time, and Raising Cain is a book that can help us better understand not only our sons but ourselves as well. Review by Book Dads

Every so often, I come across a book that I want to press into the hands of everyone I know -- in this case, into the hands of everyone I know who is the parent of a boy. This book on the development of boys is easy to read and very accessible, and would be a wonderful title to own and refer to frequently.½

I am finding this helpful and enlightening as the parent of a 7 year old rambunctious boy

I liked this book a lot but I wish it would have had more concrete suggestions of how to protect the emotional life of boys interspersed throughout instead of waiting until the last chapter.

This is definitely worth reading if you have anything at all to do with influencing boys. I particularly found the chapters on fathers, mothers, and causes of violence interesting and useful. The book also put into words a concept I have thought to be true for years - that a person (not just a boy) is stronger when he or she learns how to create peace from within rather than relying on it from external sources.

A useful followup to their other book, Best Friends, Worst Enemies. A good explanation of the social interaction between children and how they develop, but still feels a bit short on practical suggestions for what to do when I'm the parent whose child says they're being teased.

If you got "Reviving Ophelia", you need "Raising Cain." Gender roles affect everyone.

Raising Cain has helped me to understand more of what might be going on in my three-year old son's head. Why can't I remember back that far to how I used to be? That would certainly make things simpler. Although it is not a guidebook, I do feel that I have a broader range of skills to positively affect my son's present and future emotional life.

Raising Cain has also given me new clues to myself as a husband, parent, and son. I am a father who wants a different type of relationship with my son than I experienced with my own father. Partly it is out of my own selfish needs, but mostly I believe my son deserves the best I can give. For me, being a father is making it up as I go along, and this book has helped me be a more patient, understanding, and loving dad.

Thanks for lending me the book, George.½

An interesting look at children's school lives from someone who does not want to knock the system. Yet all his findings seem to point to the fact that school fails many young people and that it is seriously flawed.

a wonderful book about people and how we treat each other and sculpt our expectations of ourselves, our world and each other.½