Listening to Fear: Helping Kids Cope, from Nightmares to the Nightly News [Paperback]

Steven Marans (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 23, 2004

Learn how to read the behavioral language of fear and talk through your child's anxieties

Adults often have trouble understanding and addressing the sources of their children's fears. In Listening to Fear, Dr. Steven Marans shares the techniques for easing distress that he has developed for children of all ages in his work as the director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence at Yale University.

His advice is based on three steps parents must take before they can talk effectively with their children. First, adults must begin to work through their own fears. Second, parents need to set aside their ideas about what their children are feeling and learn from the children themselves. Third, Marans's experience has shown that children and adolescents communicate their unease in actions more than in words, so adults must learn to interpret this behavioral language.

Listening to Fear also offers specific, pragmatic tactics for actually speaking with kids, organized by age group and proven in Marans's research. These methods include ways to
- ask about the concerns and worries of your child's friends
- think through the messages behind your child's questions before answering
- reassure your child with facts, but not too many

Listening to Fear is an indispensable guide for parents and for children anxious about an ever-threatenting world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"There has never been a time when children were isolated from events demonstrating that our worst nightmares can come true," Marans writes in this clear, concise manual to handling childhood and adolescent fears. Where there was once Hiroshima, there is now 9/11. Where there was once Mount St. Helens, there are now tsunamis. As the director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence, Marans has seen firsthand the impact that traumatic events like school shootings can have on children. But he also recognizes that many childhood fears revolve around less sensational events: car accidents, peer humiliation, a dark basement, domestic violence, moving from a crib to a "big boy" bed. He covers the whole spectrum of frights in this useful book, drawing on his extensive experience as a child psychologist to provide dozens of specific examples involving infants, toddlers, grade-schoolers and adolescents. Marans is especially good at demonstrating how each child's reaction to a fearful event is unique and could easily remain buried without careful listening and guidance. (For example, a toddler's fear of sleeping alone can surface in a sudden loss of toilet training.) Marans urges parents to look at their own fears first and to acknowledge the limits of their own parental powers. "We don't know what exactly is going on inside our children minds," he reminds them, which is why listening, observation and play are so important. Though the book could have benefited from more direct instructions on how to engage children in constructive dialog and games-too often here all the problems are solved only when the psychologist himself swoops in-Marans has nonetheless put together a helpful primer to parenting in modern times, including an appendix on answering "questions children ask about war and terrorism."
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Review

“Listening to Fear is timely, accessible, and very helpful. Steven Marans has drawn on his personal and professional experience and broad-based expertise to help us help our children and ourselves with the unique challenges of danger and terror in this age.”
--James P. Comer, M.D., Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry, Yale Child Study Center and associate dean, Yale University School of Medicine, author of Leave No Child Behind

“Steven Marans insightful and exquisitely sensitive book provides direction and answers to help parents support children. His carefully crafted narratives illustrating how children of different ages experience trauma and ways that parents can help them are important tools for parents. Dr. Marans’s book is an invaluable resource to help parents and other adults talk to and support children living with fear and uncertainty.”
--Joy D. Osofsky, Ph.D., Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Public Health, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center

"The title of Listening to Fear is unusually apt, but then Marans is an unusually gifted listener. He is also a rare mix of skilled observer and doer, unafraid of articulating the fears of our youngest citizens. This is precisely why this book is so welcome here and now. In a time when fear is more widely exploited then explained, this book is a Rosetta stone. It uses several languages—narrative, analytic, occasionally political—to promote understanding and better approaches to the relationships between ordinary, if powerful, childhood fears and horrific societal ones. So often when parents turn to experts for help with deeply worrisome and pervasive issues like those addressed in Listening to Fear, they are disappointed. Not this time. Your children, and your abiding concerns for them are in this book."
--Kyle Pruett, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Nursing, Yale University School of Medicine, author of Me, Myself and I

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; First Edition edition (December 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805076042
• ISBN-13: 978-0805076042
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,953,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but not much practical help, August 7, 2006

By 

Barbara Fox (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Listening to Fear: Helping Kids Cope, from Nightmares to the Nightly News (Paperback)

I purchased this book hoping to get some help with my 7 year old son... He has suddenly developed fear of a number of things and I wanted some ideas of how to help him cope... This book was interesting, but it didn't really give me any specific ideas on how to help my son, which was what I really wanted..

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Book itself is unrelated to title, January 26, 2010

By 

Brian Needelman (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Listening to Fear: Helping Kids Cope, from Nightmares to the Nightly News (Paperback)

My main interest was the 3 to 6-year-old chapter. As I began reading it I was a bit surprised to see that it started with issues of sexuality, which was fine but curious. But then it kept going, the entire chapter was on sexuality, portraying kids this age as struggling to control their urges, teetering upon the brink of overstimulation, traumatized with desire if they saw a glimpse of parental nudity--really weird psycho Freudian stuff. And there were no recommendations, there was nothing related to the title, it was all background. So, I flipped to the table of contents to see where the recommendations part was--well most of the book is this age category stuff, then there are three chapters on serious trauma issues (which go way beyond the subject of the title), and then there are a whopping five pages of APPENDICES with recommendations--which mostly relate to the trauma stuff anyway. It's as if someone wrote an intro to outdated freudian child psychology plus some information on severe trauma psychology, but then realized no one would want to read that, so they called it a helpful book on fears and nightmares. The author is the director of a center for kids exposed to violence, so maybe this book would be helpful for severely traumatized kids, but it seems like such cases would require professional assistance anyway.