Saturday, August 1, 2015

BUT WHY BUY?? What's different about this new book that will help me?


You can now buy Too Mad to Trust as a paperback, for Kindle, or on iBooks. If you know of a child having trouble facing fears, you've come to the right place for the right book!

This book works to do a couple of things for parents, kids, teachers, students, educators, and researchers (I fit into several of those categories and often feel like a kid too!): 

1. Grabs Attention Through Vibrant Watercolor Illustrations
    -We designed these specifically to strengthen shrinking attention spans. This year, according to The National Center for Biotechnology Information, the average attention span in the U.S. is 8.25 seconds. You may have heard that the attention span for a goldfish is longer at 9 seconds! ACM Transactions on the Web studied the average number of words folks read on a single website before moving on; about 55 words, with 17 percent of browsers only looking at a website for less than 4 seconds. 

MAKING A QUICK, POWERFUL IMPACT IS CRITICAL IN LENGTHENING ATTENTION SPANS.
   -The National Education Association quotes expert, and Too Mad to Trust co-author, Linda Nathan, in a February 2015 article targeting how to help children focus in a bid to lengthen these attention spans.

2. Launches a Discussion Sparking Self-Directed Initiatives
   -If your son or daughter doesn't like to ask others to play, you'll see a change in their attitudes after reading the book and discussing some of the suggested questions at the end. Allow the message to become naturally interpreted by your children and read the book several times on different days, dealing with only one discussion topic at a time. Don’t forget to make sure your kids are reading the book on their own too! This way, kids internalize the message differently. They'll take the initiative to change a behavior when they're ready, so you want to suggest that they ask someone else to play only after some time has passed since you read and discussed the book for the third or forth time. Often, you'll discover that they'll volunteer to ask...if you don't push them. You merely wait for your son or daughter to naturally request to take that initiative, which is how this book was designed from a social psychology perspective.

3. Addresses Questions About Who to Trust (and Why)
   -In this first book in a series about the types of folks you want kids to trust and those you want them to be skeptical about, you’ll find a special focus on trusting friends. What does it mean to be a friend and why should you trust them? This topical theme is the heart and soul of our book.

4. Helps Adults Sense When to Address a Child’s Fears Directly
   -It’s challenging to know when to step in and guide your children and when to let them figure out things on their own. With 80-93 percent of all communication nonverbal, from our vocal inflections to our gestures and facial expressions, we say so much without ever speaking a word! This book helps parents, educators, and teachers better tune in to nonverbal cues children provide that tell us whether we should intervene. But you have to watch your son or daughter, listening more with your “eyes” than your ears. It’s a different way of thinking, so it will take some time to adjust just like anything else. Once you know what to look for, you know when to jump in or stay away—all of which is crucial in your child’s mental development.
   -Stay tuned for more posts on nonverbal communication cues, as we make this forum into more of a “reference library” for you to access tools and tips easily. Or subscribe by giving us your information so we can notify you each time a new tip emerges on our blog, our website, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and a free content website I post articles on that’s more research oriented called Academia. We’ll also have YouTube videos coming soon!

5. Stops a Speech & Language Disorder Before it’s a Lifelong Plague
   -When kids are deeply afraid of something, it’s usually not about the things they discuss with anyone. Fear of the dark, fear about going to a new school, fear about making friends—all of these are fears your child will tell you about. It’s the fears your child only tells you about through their nonverbal cues that require attention to avoid some speech and language disorders that grow worse with age. Stuttering can be one example that can stem from anxiety rooted in fears. Selective mutism is another, which is kind of like “selective hearing” only on a scale that requires treatment with a certified clinical Speech-Language Pathologist like my Mom, Linda Nathan.
   -This book is designed to flesh out those nonverbal cues so you can more visibly notice the link between your kid’s fear of one thing and the related beginnings of a potential speech and language problem. It takes time to learn how to recognize these links, which is why I’ll continue to add tips on our blog throughout the next year as we read to elementary school students while studying the book’s effectiveness. Don’t beat yourself up just yet if you have trouble discerning the signs or seeing the link between unchecked fears and related disorders. Reading this book with kids and working with it by yourself are the best first steps you can take to help children!

You may also want to head to some of the other social media sites I discussed, with links above and throughout this website. They have articles that aren’t necessarily on here, especially my work on LinkedIn and Academia. You can also use those resources to see the work of other scholars studying the relationship between emotions in children and speech-language disorders, although there is a dearth of articles on the subject right now. That’s why we feel it’s critical to study this book’s effectiveness. It expands and builds on a, currently, very limited crop of research in the field.

        Have a question?? Make sure to ask us and we’ll get right back to you!





Josh Nathan, MA



Linda Nathan, MA CCC-SLP
We’re here to help more than we’re here to sell books.
 In fact, this book is our way of starting a conversation and beginning to shine additional light on a growing problem in America. As a university professor, I want you to feel you learn something every time you come to our website, read an article or paper I wrote, or catch a speech I give. I’m also always open to talking directly with you, coming into a school to help, or scheduling an event in which we’ll work on these concepts together. I’m here to help you. That’s what I do every day as an educator…and I love it!

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