The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing [Hardcover]

Bruce D. Perry (Author), Maia Szalavitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 2007

What happens when a young brain is traumatized? How does terror, abuse, or disaster affect a child's mind--and how can that mind recover? Child psychiatrist Bruce Perry has helped children faced with unimaginable horror: genocide survivors, murder witnesses, kidnapped teenagers, and victims of family violence. In The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, he tells their stories of trauma and transformation through the lens of science, revealing the brain's astonishing capacity for healing. Deftly combining unforgettable case histories with his own compassionate, insightful strategies for rehabilitation, Perry explains what exactly happens to the brain when a child is exposed to extreme stress-and reveals the unexpected measures that can be taken to ease a child's pain and help him grow into a healthy adult. Through the stories of children who recover-physically, mentally, and emotionally-from the most devastating circumstances, Perry shows how simple things like surroundings, affection, language, and touch can deeply impact the developing brain, for better or for worse. In this deeply informed and moving book, Bruce Perry dramatically demonstrates that only when we understand the science of the mind can we hope to heal the spirit of even the most wounded child.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In beautifully written, fascinating accounts of experiences working with emotionally stunted and traumatized children, child psychiatrist Perry educates readers about how early-life stress and violence affects the developing brain. He offers simple yet vivid illustrations of the stress response and the brain's mechanisms with facts and images that crystallize in the mind without being too detailed or confusing. The stories exhibit compassion, understanding and hope as Perry paints detailed, humane pictures of patients who have experienced violence, sexual abuse or neglect, and Perry invites the reader on his own journey to understanding how the developing child's brain works. He learns that to facilitate recovery, the loss of control and powerlessness felt by a child during a traumatic experience must be counteracted. Recovery requires that the patient be "in charge of key aspects of the therapeutic interaction." He emphasizes that the brain of a traumatized child can be remolded with patterned, repetitive experiences in a safe environment. Most importantly, as such trauma involves the shattering of human connections, "lasting, caring connections to others" are irreplaceable in healing; medications and therapy alone cannot do the job. "Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love," Perry concludes. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Although many parents fret over how to raise a more academically and financially successful child, Perry has learned a thing or two about how not to raise a prospective sociopath. Here he shares the stories of several children he has encountered in his decades as a child psychiatrist and expert on childhood trauma. Each child, from the seven-year-old who offered him sexual favors to the eponymous boy who spent his early years living in a dog cage, taught Perry something about the effects of early childhood trauma on brain development. His discoveries contradict the formerly held precept that children are emotionally resilient and will outgrow insults to their psyches. On the contrary, he says, severe and occasionally even not-so-severe emotional or physical abuse can chemically alter early brain development, resulting later in the inability to make appropriate, socially sanctioned behavioral decisions. Perry doesn't promote what he calls the "abuse excuse" for antisocial or criminal behavior; rather, he makes a powerful case for early intervention for disruptive children to prevent adult sociopathy. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (January 8, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465056520
• ISBN-13: 978-0465056521
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #407,841 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love does heal these children!, February 3, 2007

By 

Connie L. Sirnio (Coos Bay, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing (Hardcover)

Thank you, Dr. Perry! Finally, what foster and adoptive parents knew all along...Love does heal these traumatized children! As a former foster parent, an adoptive and birth parent, and a child and family therapist, I am overjoyed to see these stories in print. It is a difficult task to find help and have professionals actually understand that this child sees the world differently for a neurodevelopmental reason, and not just because they are oppositional. Dr. Perry has shared this information in a way that anyone who reads it will think differently, with his incredible storytelling. It is so important for children with prenatal and postnatal trauma to be understood and to matter. Neurodevelopmental principles are not that difficult to put into place at home, school, or in the community. Children must experience success on a daily basis, at their individual neurodevelopmental pace. I have seen it work in many children.

Dr. Perry puts it very simple when he stated in this book:

"For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that "unless you love yourself, no one else will love you." Women were told that they didn't need men, and vice versa. People without any relationships were believed to be as healthy as those who had many. These ideas contradict the fundamental biology of human species: we are social mammals and could never have survived without deeply interconnected and interdependent human contact. The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation."

This book is a must read for anyone working with traumatized children, raising healthy children, or just raising each other!

Connie Sirnio, MSW, LCSW
Child and Family Therapist
PsyD Learner in Clinical Psychology
Coos Bay, Oregon

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Please Buy This Book On Cheaper Kindle Page, April 3, 2009

By 

Maia Szalavitz - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing (Kindle Edition)

I am the co-author of this book. We want everyone to buy it but for some reason, Amazon sells the Kindle version at a "hardcover" price about $5 more than the "paperback" price even though the text of both editions is exactly the same. It is not clear why this is and we are trying to have it corrected: if this is inappropriate for a review, please delete it but fix the problem!

We don't want you to feel ripped off, so please buy either the real paperback, the real hardcover or the cheaper Kindle version (click to it by starting from the page for the paperback, not the hardcover) and consider donating the extra $5 to the child-related charity of your choice.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Understand Trauma in people's lives, February 10, 2007

By 

Mary E. George "truth seeker" (st. petersburg, fl) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing (Hardcover)

I am a mental health counseling student and am so happy that I ordered this book. The author has left in all the needed details to help understand the complexities of trauma on the brain and the later affects to a child's or adult's life. You may even discover something about your own confused background in the process. Once I picked up the book it was hard to put down even though I have SO much other required reading. This should be a required book because of the common sense approach. I learned a lot. I hope Dr Perry and Ms Szalavitz write more psychiatric books. The case choices were interesting and very detailed. Thank you for taking the extra time to get all the details in there. I know how hard it is to go the extra distance to make the reading more informative and accurate.