The Strength Switch
How The New Science of Strength-Based Parenting Can Help Your Child and Your Teen to Flourish
by Lea Waters
ebook
1 of 1 copy available
This game-changing book shows us the extraordinary results of focusing on our children’s strengths rather than always trying to correct their weaknesses. Most parents struggle with this shift because they suffer from a negativity bias, thanks to evolutionary development, giving them “strengths-blindness.” By showing us how to throw the “strengths switch,” Lea Waters demonstrates how we can not only help our children build resilience, optimism, and achievement but we can also help inoculate them against today’s pandemic of depression and anxiety.
As a strengths-based scientist for more than twenty years, ten of them spent focusing on strengths-based parenting, Waters has seen how this approach enhances self-esteem and energy in both children and teenagers. Yet more on the plus side: parents find it a particularly exciting and rewarding way to raise children. With many suggestions for specific ways to interact with your kids, Waters demonstrates how to discover strengths and talents in our children, how to use positive emotions as a resource, how to build strong brains, and even how to deal with problem behaviors and talk about difficult situations and emotions. As revolutionary yet simple as Mindset and Grit, The Strength Switch will show parents how a small shift can yield enormous results.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
July 11, 2017 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
- ISBN: 9781101983669
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781101983669
- File size: 1159 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781101983669
- File size: 1159 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 17, 2017
The framework of positive psychology, combined with recent studies into strength, yields here a parenting method that ditches a culturally dominant negativity bias in which parents are focused on correcting weaknesses. Psychologist Avery encourages parents to “flick the switch” by instead focusing on acknowledging and building on their children’s strengths so that their children develop self-esteem, optimism, resilience, and self-control. Waters teaches parents to identify their children’s strengths at the intersection of spontaneous high performance, high energy, and high use, and then to find natural opportunities for these strengths to be used and developed. She sketches out a framework that considers problematic behaviors as resulting from overuse or underuse of strengths. Waters also offers parents and children alike methods for achieving other aspects of positive psychology—attention, gratitude, and mindfulness. Despite the focus on positivity, Waters comes off as a thoughtful parenting realist and not a spacey happiness guru, supporting her ideas with a mix of parental anecdotes and pointers to psychological research. Waters’s clearly presented, easily implemented ideas will make sense to parents looking to escape the corrective mind-set that can make both them and their children feel defective or broken, especially in the children’s teen years.
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