For/About Children/Teens – Trish’s Mental Health Resources Blog

What Happens When Someone I Love Can’t Get Better: A Book to Prepare and Cope with End of Life

By Jenni Rogers (Author), Sara Olsher (Author) (2024).

From Amazon.com: “It’s a conversation no one wants to have – you just found out someone you love is dying or needs hospice, and you don’t have as much time as you’d hoped. How do you tell the kids? Where do you start?

Millions of families, when faced with a shortened life expectancy, struggle with how to talk to their kids about it. We don’t want to take away their innocence or end their childhood. How do we have this conversation in a way that isn’t devastating or super scary? We start by making it make sense, from a scientific point of view.

Join Mia and her stuffed giraffe Stuart as they explain how bodies work and what happens when important body parts aren’t able to do their jobs anymore. What Happens When Someone I Love Can’t Get Better uses bright and engaging illustrations to explain what keeps bodies alive and helps reduce confusion about why bodies die.

It covers important topics such as:

how internal organs are supposed to function
what happens when internal organs stop functioning properly
the role of medicine and surgery in treatment
what happens when medicine is no longer effective
comfort care and hospice
legacy building and memory keeping

…all using child-friendly terms that explain and normalize death.

Open, Honest, and Accessible: Kids can handle learning the truth about most any situation – as long as it’s presented in a way that makes sense to them.

Validation of Feelings: By shining a light on big (and sometimes shameful) feelings, this book validates kids’ feelings and experiences, reassuring them that their emotions are normal and encouraging them to share with a trusted grown-up, in addition to providing suggestions for coping.

Resource for Caregivers: When there’s no resource to make hard conversations easier, grown-ups are far less likely to have them. This book aims to empower adults and kids with knowledge, which is proven to help kids through traumatic situations.Therapeutic and Educational Tool: What Happens When Someone I Love Can’t Get Better is a go-to book in hospitals, schools, counseling settings, and support groups. There are no references to God or the afterlife, leaving room for families to have discussions based on their own belief system.”

Dibs in Search of Self: The Renowned, Deeply Moving Story of an Emotionally Lost Child Who Found His Way Back

By Virginia M. Axline. (1986)

From Anazon.com: “The classic of child therapy. Dibs will not talk. He will not play. He has locked himself in a very special prison. And he is alone. This is the true story of how he learned to reach out for the sunshine, for life . . . how he came to the breathless discovery of himself that brought him back to the world of other children.”

From Anazon.com: “Virginia Axline (1911-1988) was a pioneer of play therapy for children.”

Original January 1, 1968

By Virginia M Axline (Author)

Helping Your Anxious Teen: Positive Parenting Strategies to Help Your Teen Beat Anxiety, Stress, and Worry

By Sheila Achar Josephs, PhD (2017)

From Amazon.com: ““… thoughtful tools for helping young people help themselves.”
—Library Journal

Parenting a teen isn’t easy, but parenting an anxious teen is especially challenging. Written by a psychologist and expert on adolescent anxiety, this essential book will show you what really works to overcome all types of teen anxiety and how to apply specific skills to support your teen.

Most parents find it frustrating when common sense and logical methods such as reassurance don’t seem to work to allay their teen’s anxiety. They want to know: Why is anxiety so hard to get rid of once it takes hold? Why aren’t my efforts to help working? And how can I best help my teen break free from anxiety to become happy and resilient?

This powerful book, based on cutting-edge research and cognitive behavioral strategies, will help you develop the know-how to effectively manage teen anxiety. You’ll learn the best ways to support your teen in overcoming problematic thinking and fears, discover what behaviors and coping strategies unwittingly make anxiety worse, and understand how anxiety is best defeated with surprisingly counterintuitive methods. Step-by-step guidance, along with numerous real-life examples and exercises, will help you to:

Sensitively redirect your teen’s worries when they intensify
Reduce social anxiety, perfectionism, and panic attacks
Proactively address common triggers of stress and anxiety
Implement a proven approach for decreasing avoidance and facing fears

From overcoming minor angst to defeating paralyzing fear, you and your teen will feel empowered by radically new ways of responding to anxiety. With Helping Your Anxious Teen, you’ll have a wealth of research-backed strategies to lead you in being an effective anxiety coach for your teen.”

Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents: 7 Ways to Stop the Worry Cycle and Raise Courageous and Independent Children

By Reid Wilson & Lynn Lyons, LICSW. (2013)

From Amazon.com: “With anxiety at epidemic levels among our children, Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents offers a contrarian yet effective approach to help children and teens push through their fears, worries, and phobias to ultimately become more resilient, independent, and happy.

How do you manage a child who gets stomachaches every school morning, who refuses after-school activities, or who is trapped in the bathroom with compulsive washing? Children like these put a palpable strain on frustrated, helpless parents and teachers. And there is no escaping the problem: One in every five kids suffers from a diagnosable anxiety disorder.

Unfortunately, when parents or professionals offer help in traditional ways, they unknowingly reinforce a child’s worry and avoidance. From their success with hundreds of organizations, schools, and families, Reid Wilson, PhD, and Lynn Lyons, LICSW, share their unconventional approach of stepping into uncertainty in a way that is currently unfamiliar but infinitely successful. Using current research and contemporary examples, the book exposes the most common anxiety-enhancing patterns—including reassurance, accommodation, avoidance, and poor problem solving—and offers a concrete plan with 7 key principles that foster change. And, since new research reveals how anxious parents typically make for anxious children, the book offers exercises and techniques to change both the children’s and the parental patterns of thinking and behaving.

This book challenges our basic instincts about how to help fearful kids and will serve as the antidote for an anxious nation of kids and their parents.”