Smart But Scattered (Second Edition)

Sample

This encouraging guide is grounded in research on the crucial brain-based skills that 4- to 13-year-olds need to get organized, stay focused, and control their impulses and emotions. The expert authors guide you to identify your child’s executive strengths and weaknesses, boost skills that are lacking, fix everyday routines that don’t work, and reduce everyone’s stress.

Including new research, new and updated vignettes, and “A Good Place to Start” suggestions for each skill, the revised and updated second edition features a new chapter on technology and a greatly expanded school chapter. Helpful practical tools can be downloaded and printed.

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. What Makes Your Child Smart but Scattered

1. How Did Such a Smart Kid End Up So Scattered?
2. Identifying Your Child’s Executive Skill Strengths and Challenges
3. How Your Own Executive Skill Strengths and Challenges Matter

II. Laying a Foundation That Can Help

4. Nine Principles for Improving Your Child’s Executive Skills
5. Modifying the Environment: A Is for Antecedent
6. Teaching Executive Skills Directly: B Is for Behavior
7. Motivating Your Child to Learn and Use Executive Skills: C Is for Consequence

III. Putting It All Together

8. Advance Organizer
9. Ready-Made Plans for Teaching Your Child to Complete Daily Routines
10. Building Response Inhibition
11. Enhancing Working Memory (sample link)
12. Improving Emotional Control
13. Encouraging Flexibility
14. Strengthening Sustained Attention
15. Teaching Task Initiation
16. Promoting, Planning, and Prioritizing
17. Fostering Organization
18. Instilling Time Management
19. Increasing Goal-Directed Persistence
20. Cultivating Metacognition
21. When What You Do Is Not Enough
22. A Brief Look at Technology
23. The Role of Schools in Executive Skill Development

Parting Thoughts
Resources
Index

Titles in Series

Smart but Scattered (Second Edition)
Smart but Scattered Teens
Smart but Scattered – and Stalled
The Smart but Scattered Guide to Success