PICTURE BOOK NONFICTION: How to Train Your Amygdala by Anna Housley Juster & Cynthia Cliff
ABOUT THE BOOK
Your amygdala keeps you safe, but what about when it gets things wrong ? This amusing training guide helps children learn to calm their amygdala and control their fight-flight-freeze impulses.
The amygdala is the brain’s alarm system that alerts for danger, but sometimes it gets things wrong and needs help calming down. In this picture book, young readers receive kid-friendly information about the amygdala from the amygdala, how it can sometimes get confused, and simple ideas to calm and train it.
The amygdala in How to Train Your Amygdala makes complicated concepts accessible to children so they can understand their bodies, practice impulse control, and boost their self-regulation. Throughout the book, the amygdala and the reader practice anxiety-calming and mindfulness strategies such as deep breathing, visualization, and progressive relaxation. With anxiety on the rise among children, learning how to calm the amygdala is a critical life skill.
Additional content at the back of the book includes an amygdala’s training playbook for kids and more information for adults to help reinforce the book’s message.
REVIEW
Knowledge can help counteract the fight, flight, or freeze responses triggered by the body's amygdala. Using a cartoonish Amygdala and kids, How to Train Your Amygdala explains in a kid-friendly fashion, exactly what the amygdala is, what it does and how it feels when it's active. Readers also learn about how the amygdala overreacts or reacts at the wrong times and in the wrong ways. The latter half of the book focuses on ways that the amygdala can be 'trained' to respond better and how kids can learn to stay calm. The back matter includes more information about training the amygdala using breathing techniques. The back matter also contains information about nervousness and advice for adults working with children. This book is a great resource for parents, teachers, counselors and others who work with children. The tips and tricks work for adults too! Highly recommended.
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