Phoebe Flower’s Adventures: Phoebe’s Best Best Friend

What is it like to live with disabilities no one can see? Readers will find out in this honest and gripping narrative of one woman’s life with hidden disabilities — including learning disabilities, ADHD, and bipolar disorder. Yet this is more than just her story of battling adversity and coming out a winner. In each chapter, renowned psychiatrist Larry Silver, M.D., shares his insight into how Veronica’s experiences — both positive and negative — influenced her academically and emotionally and how early diagnosis and intervention might have benefited her. These two compelling accounts give readers an appreciation for the difficulties and triumphs living with hidden disabilites can bring and an awareness of what can be done to help.

The goal of this book is to help readers recast the paradigm they use to think about the condition, encouraging them to help ADHD kids develop their unique gifts. It begins with an overview of current ADHD diagnosis including definitions and a sample of a case study. Each subsequent chapter reframes certain ADHD symptoms in a positive way and reinforces this transformation with awareness exercises designed to increase the appreciation of the child’s traits.

Ted Cheltoni, 12, has a good friend, a great girlfriend, and would have a pretty normal life if it weren’t for his little brother, Harry. Harry’s not bad on purpose, but Ted would sure like to fix the kid up so everybody would stop asking him to undo Harry’s hyperactive, outrageous behavior. The tension at home gets so bad that Ted’s afraid his parents will get divorced. One day, after Harry finds out he’s suspended from school and kicked off the bus for the following week, Ted finds him packing to leave home. Ted knows he has to do something, and quick, to help his little brother.

Thoughtful and practical, this book will appeal to today’s busy parents, with its concise, easy-to-read style. Now in a convenient format, Don’t Miss the Bus! is even more accessible to parents with no time to spare. Smialek offers her expertise as a parent and teacher and shares her methods and anecdotes from her own home and classroom. She advocates a win-win approach with a concise action plan to prevent problems before they happen and maintain dignity for both parents and kids. Don’t Miss the Bus! focuses on children’s strengths rather than their weaknesses, resulting in happier, more knowledgeable, and more resilient parent-child-teacher relationships.

This book resulted from a national search for models of before- and after-school child care that served children and youth with disabilities. After an opening section which summarizes the results of a national parent survey, there are separate chapters that profile home-based (family child care) models, public school-operated models, models operated in partnership between schools and other organizations, and community-based models. Appendices include parent and provider surveys resource listings, and a quality checklist. At the time the book was published, the author was a research associate at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and editor of a nationally circulated newsletter on policy and practice in school age child care. The study was the first of its kind and the book remains the only one published on this subject.

In this practical handbook for parents, clinical psychologists Brooks and Goldstein draw on their considerable experience working with children and families to demonstrate that parents’ core goal should be to instill in their children a sense of inner recourse. “A resilient child is an emotionally healthy child, equipped to successfully confront challenges and bounce back from setbacks,” they contend, and to this end they provide 10 parenting “guideposts” for nurturing the kind of resilience that helps children thrive.