Raising Resilient Children: Fostering Strength, Hope, and Optimism in Your Child

“I’m normal because I am a normal kid — going to school, being happy, getting homework, having a family. I’m not normal because I’m dyslexic…” Thus begins the autobiography of an eleven-year-old boy who describes how he created a board game based on the popular Harry Potter series and entered it into his school’s yearly Invention Convention, where it became an instant hit.

Do people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder have a “Deficit” and a “Disorder”? Or are they just different in some ways from people around them? In Distant Drums and Different Drummers, the author presents a more positive perspective on ADHD — one that stresses the value of individual differences. The child with ADHD, with his penchant for novelty and exploration, his boundless energy, and his tendency to take risks, is seen as the descendant of a long line of adventures and explorers stretching far back beyond the beginnings of recorded history.

Peer Power explodes existing myths about children’s friendships, power, and popularity, and the gender chasm between elementary school boys and girls. Based on eight years of intensive insider participant observation in their own children’s community, the authors discuss the vital components in the lives of preadolescents: popularity, friendships, cliques, social status, social isolation, loyalty, bullying, boy-girl relationships, and afterschool activities.

Kids write letters to one of the greatest scientists of all time — and he answers them!

This book offers a small sampling of the amusing, touching, and sometimes precocious letters sent to Albert Einstein by children from around the world, and his often witty and very considerate responses. Alice Calaprice has compiled a delightful and charming collection of more than 60 letters, most never published before, from children to perhaps the greatest scientist of all time. Enhancing this correspondence are numerous photographs showing Einstein amid children, wearing an Indian headdress, carrying a puppet of himself, donning furry slippers, among many other wonderful pictures. They reveal the intimate human side of the great public persona, a man who, though he spent his days contemplating the impersonal abstractions of mathematics and physics, was very fond of children and enjoyed being in their company. 

Author Rondalyn Varney Whitney, a pediatric occupational therapist, is the mother of Zac, a child who suffers from nonverbal learning disorder, or NLD. By definition, NLD is a neurological defect in children who are unable to recognize the nonverbal clues that make up 50 percent of communication. In Bridging the Gap, Whitney seamlessly weaves practical professional advice throughout the account of her passionate involvement with her son. She writes, “I believe that NLD, now thought to be as prevalent as dyslexia, is a difference and not a flaw.” She also warns parents and teachers that kids with NLD are likely to be misdiagnosed as lazy or defiant, so she urges readers to consider both the strengths (high intelligence and advanced verbal skills and memory) and weaknesses (low visual, spatial, and motor skills and deficits in social communication) of these kids.

“Disabilities can be ‘nuisances,’ but … differences are good. They add to the richness of our world.” This illustrated book explores both physical and learning disabilities. You’ll also learn how many famous historical figures had disabilities and succeeded despite them.