Customer Reviews

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

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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..

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 It's as if someone wrote an intro to outdated freudian child psychology plus some information on severe trauma psychology, but then realized no one would want to read that, so they called it a helpful book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.