Blending cutting-edge research with engaging storytelling, The Breakthrough Years offers readers a paradigm-shifting comprehensive understanding of adolescence.
Almost every adolescent has said to parents, “You JUST don’t understand.”
In The Breakthrough Years, child development expert Ellen Galinsky explains why that is so often true.
Galinsky’s seven-year inquiry into the adolescent brain and behavior, including conducting original studies—uniquely informed by the questions adolescents have about their own development—shows why our understanding of adolescence is out of step with the latest research—and how to correct it. She:
· Identifies Five Basic Needs—such as belonging, developing competence, and building an identity—and shows how we can meet these needs in positive ways;
· Presents Five Life Skills that are developing rapidly during adolescence like setting goals and strategies, perspective taking, critical thinking, and taking on challenges and shows how we can promote them;
· Introduces Solutions Mindset and Shared Solutions, a problem-solving mindset and process that parents and others can use to help create solutions to their adolescent’s challenging problems.
Ellen Galinsky’s paradigm-shifting book will help parents and those who work with teens to understand adolescence not as the “I hope we can get though these years” but as the breakthrough years that they truly can be
The President of the Families and Work Institute writes a book of groundbreaking advice based on the latest research on child development
Ellen Galinsky has spent her entire career studying early childhood development, first at Vassar College, then for twenty-five years at the Bank Street College of Education, and for the past twenty years as the founder and now president of the Families and Work Institute. What she has found is that there is an enormous gap between what researchers have discovered and what parents have been told about those discoveries. Minds in the Making bridges this gap, bringing the work of more than a hundred scientists into a form that parents everywhere can use. Galinsky has divided this information into the seven skills she believes all children should learn, showing parents not only what children are capable of, but specifically how to develop those capabilities in their children.
There are hundreds of books that give parents advice on everything from weaning to toilet training, from discipline to nutrition. But in spite of this overwhelming amount of information, there is very little research-based advice for parents on how to raise their children to be well rounded and achieve their full potential, helping them learn to take on life’s challenges, communicate well with others, and remain committed to learning. These are the “essential life skills” that Ellen Galinsky has spent her career pursuing, both through her own studies and through decades of talking with more than a hundred of the most outstanding researchers in child development and neuroscience. The good news is that there are simple everyday things that all parents can do to build these skills in their children for today and for the future. They don’t cost money, and it’s never too late to begin.
Mind in the Making is a truly groundbreaking book, one that teaches parents how to give children the most important tools they will need. Already acclaimed by such thought leaders as T. Berry Brazelton, David A. Hamburg, Adele Faber, and Judy Woodruff, Mind in the Making is destined to become a classic in the literature of parenting.
“A valuable resource! Ellen Galinsky’s extensive research reveals important insights into the science of early learning.”—Adele Faber, #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk
