Here are 100 books that Calm the Chaos fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve always been drawn to babies and toddlers and fascinated by the development that happens in the early years of life. This fascination led me to become a teacher, parent, and emotional development expert with a master's degree in early childhood education. Eventually, my passion for this field led me to co-create the Collaborative Emotion Processing method and research it nationwide. The research results were compelling, and so began my mission to share it with the world.
I love this book because it explains how a child’s brain works and what they need to access self-control. It gave me insight into why I saw challenging behaviors even when the child “knew better.”
I loved that when I finished reading it, I felt like I had actionable strategies for supporting my child’s mental well-being while navigating tantrums and meltdowns.
In this pioneering, practical book for parents, neuroscientist Daniel J. Siegel and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson explain the new science of how a child's brain is wired and how it matures. Different parts of a child's brain develop at different speeds and understanding these differences can help you turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child's brain and raise calmer, happier children.
Featuring clear explanations, age-appropriate strategies and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child will help your children to lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives using…
I’ve always been drawn to babies and toddlers and fascinated by the development that happens in the early years of life. This fascination led me to become a teacher, parent, and emotional development expert with a master's degree in early childhood education. Eventually, my passion for this field led me to co-create the Collaborative Emotion Processing method and research it nationwide. The research results were compelling, and so began my mission to share it with the world.
“Gripping…how can teachers snatch back their critical role and give children the necessary space to fail? They could start by making parents read Lahey.” — New York Times Book Review
In the tradition of Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed and Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, this groundbreaking manifesto focuses on the critical school years when parents must learn to allow their children to experience the disappointment and frustration that occur from life’s inevitable problems so that they can grow up to be successful, resilient, and self-reliant adults.
I’ve always been drawn to babies and toddlers and fascinated by the development that happens in the early years of life. This fascination led me to become a teacher, parent, and emotional development expert with a master's degree in early childhood education. Eventually, my passion for this field led me to co-create the Collaborative Emotion Processing method and research it nationwide. The research results were compelling, and so began my mission to share it with the world.
I loved this book because it tackled the idea of shame and blame in parenthood. It also helped me to release fear-based parenting. So much of discipline and punishment in parenthood is related to fear.
Dr. Shefali challenged me to reframe my ideas about raising a conscious, emotionally well child.
Instead of being merely the receiver of the parents' psychological and spiritual legacy, children function as ushers of the parents' development. Parents unwittingly pass on an inheritance of psychological pain and emotional shallowness. To handle the behavior that results, traditional books on parenting abound with clever techniques for control and quick fixes for dysfunction. In Dr. Shefali Tsabary's conscious approach to parenting, however, children serve as mirrors of their parents' forgotten self. Those willing to look in the mirror have an opportunity to establish a relationship with their own inner state of wholeness. Once they find their way back to…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I’ve always been drawn to babies and toddlers and fascinated by the development that happens in the early years of life. This fascination led me to become a teacher, parent, and emotional development expert with a master's degree in early childhood education. Eventually, my passion for this field led me to co-create the Collaborative Emotion Processing method and research it nationwide. The research results were compelling, and so began my mission to share it with the world.
I love this book because it changed my entire outlook on behavior. It helped me understand the relationship between nervous system regulation and emotional regulation.
It helped me identify the underlying needs that drive the challenging behaviors we see in childhood. It changed the game for me as a parent and teacher.
There's no such thing as a bad kid. That's what a lifetime of experience has taught Dr. Stuart Shanker. No matter how difficult, out of control, distracted, or exhausted a child might seem, there's a way forward: self-regulation. Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, this radical new technique allows children and the adults who care for them to regain their composure and peace of mind.
Self-Reg is a groundbreaking book that presents an entirely new understanding of your child's emotions and behavior and a practical guide for parents to help their kids engage calmly and successfully in learning and life. Grounded…
When I began writing my first novel, the words “what happens next is up to all of us” became my guiding mantra. I have just completed my second novel with the same theme, The Space Between Dark and Light. It will be released early in 2023. During the years between the two books, I have become a speaker on topics related to the environment and peace. In 2020, I received an award as a Creative Environmental and Peace Activist from Visioneers International Network. It is the thought of the world our grandchildren (and generations after them) will inherit from us that makes me care passionately about the future.
This novel intrigued me because of Robin, a young boy who cares deeply about endangered animals. Powers uses the child as a device to make readers think about our earth and its inhabitants. I did the same with the character in my novel. Both children agonize over how to make adults pay attention to the crisis we face.
While the plot centers on a father’s intense devotion to his struggling son, Powers succeeds in portraying nature’s magnificence and its increasing fragility. I am in awe of his ability to create such a page-turning plot in a message-driven book.
The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin's emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother's brain...
I never really thought much about how limited and exclusionary our society’s ideas about intelligence are until my daughter, who has Down syndrome, was required to take her first IQ test before she started kindergarten. That experience led me to research the history of the IQ test and how it has shaped our culture’s ideas about intelligence in pernicious ways. I am a college professor who is working to change the educational and employment opportunities available to people with intellectual disabilities. I hope you enjoy the books on this list. May they lead you to reconsider what you think it means to be smart.
This book completely flipped the way that I think about “bad kids” in a classroom. I am a highly obedient person, to my own detriment, and I remember very clearly being a rule-follower in school and never wanting to get in trouble and be labeled a “bad kid.”
Shalaby helped me work through all the engrained biases I have about kids labeled as troublemakers and see that it’s actually the educational expectations (sit down, be quiet) that we need to interrogate.
Despite decades of research on classroom management and school discipline, so-called bad behaviour nevertheless persists in every kind of classroom in every kind of school. Even as the harsh disciplining of adolescent behaviour has been called out as part of the school-to-prison pipeline, the diverse 'problem children' in Troublemakers - Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus - reveal how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.
I attended school for fourteen years, experiencing a wide range of different school types, from an experimental child-centred school in Washington DC to a Steiner school in rural Wiltshire to an all-girls’ comprehensive school in Bath. I hated school and my teachers and peers frequently hated me. In revenge, I became a historian of childhood and education in modern Britain so I could try and work out why school was so bad, and why children and teenagers are not listened to in British society. I did my PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and am now an Academic Track Fellow in History at Newcastle University.
Plenty of sociologists have gone into schools and tried to work out what kids think, but few have written about the experience as clearly, directly, and thoughtfully as Corrigan.
Corrigan did research with teenage working-class boys who attended two different schools in Sunderland in the early 1970s. He found, in short, that these boys did not like school; they especially did not like the fact that they were forced to go. This made Corrigan question why we make young people attend institutions that they hate, and which they do not benefit from.
Despite recent ‘progressive’ reforms in education, nothing had changed: ‘they didn’t like [school] when it was all maths and exams; they now didn’t seem to like it when it was all civics and projects’.
I love prickly children. I was one myself, and I’ve quite a few of them in my family. I’ve also worked with desperate families over the years, children who are out of control, parents feeling overwhelmed, nobody knowing what to do to find the calm and loving core of connection we all yearn for. I feel the suffering these authors document—the child’s sense of being misunderstood and punished unfairly, and the parent’s desperation. So, when I read a book that offers intelligent and caring solutions driven by science, compassion, and experience, I share it with everyone who will listen. I’m delighted to have a chance here to do that.
One of Dr. Greene’s basic beliefs, reiterated often in this wise and compassionate book, is that “Kids do well if they can.” Instead of seeing their child as manipulative, attention-seeking, stubborn, controlling, or defiant, readers learn to understand that really, the child lacks some necessary skills: flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, emotion regulation, and problem-solving. Using a combination of exposition, explanation, and stories from his decades of practice with troubled kids in many circumstances, Greene shows parents how to put the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model into action. He reassures readers that—even if they’ve been doing it all wrong until now—there’s always room for growth and change, starting now. “Kids are resilient,” he writes. “They come around if we start doing the right thing.”
Now in a revised and updated 6th edition, the groundbreaking, research-based approach to understanding and parenting children who frequently exhibit severe fits of temper and other challenging behaviors, from a distinguished clinician and pioneer in the field.
What's an explosive child? A child who responds to routine problems with extreme frustration-crying, screaming, swearing, kicking, hitting, biting, spitting, destroying property, and worse. A child whose frequent, severe outbursts leave his or her parents feeling frustrated, scared, worried, and desperate for help. Most of these parents have tried everything-reasoning, explaining, punishing, sticker charts, therapy, medication-but to no avail. They can't figure out…
I was raised as one of two white kids in a large, multiracial adoptive family by loving parents who wanted to change the world. Our parents were thoughtful about adoption, ambitious about the symbolism of our family, and raised us all to be conscious about race, to see it, and to guard against it. But the world is a lot bigger than our house and racism is insidious and so, in a way, we all eventually got swallowed up. So I started thinking hard about the dynamic relationship between race and adoption and family when I was just a kid, and I’ve never really stopped.
When I picked up this book at a local bookstore in Indiana, I knew that it was going to take me places – the cover photo of two adorable children, one white and one black, standing in front of a yellow school bus told me that.
Julia Scheeres’s parents adopted an African American child her age named David, and the two became inseparable. Their extraordinary story – their intense commitment to each other as they move through dystopian settings ranging from the bleakness of rural Indiana to a strict religious reform school in the tropical Caribbean – was inspiring.
And the jaw-dropping ending of the book just broke me into pieces.
"A page turner . . . heart-stopping and enraging . . . focused, justified, and without a trace of self-pity. Shot through with poignancy." ––New York Times Book Review
Over a decade after its first publication, Jesus Land remains deeply resonant with readers. Now with a new preface by the author, this New York Times bestselling memoir is a gripping tale of rage and redemption, hope and humor, morality and malice―and most of all, the truth: that being a good person takes more than just going to church.
Julia and her adopted brother, David, are sixteen years old. Julia is…
The Curiosity Cycle is a book for parents and educators who want to teach their children to be active explorers of the world. Learning through curiosity leads to adaptive thinking because your child is continually trying to improve his or her understanding of the world, and new facts and ideas…
I’m a novelist and poet from a working-class Dublin suburb. The small press I started at 18 published early works by Sebastian Barry, Colm Toibin, Fintan O’Toole, etc. Because I felt that working-class life was not being written about, I became interested in hidden aspects of Irish society. Adoption was often kept secret when I was small. When I first wrote A Second Life, I was amazed by how many people told me how they were adopted but had never told anyone. I want to do justice to their stories and their mothers’ stories. Hopefully readers will think that, in some small way, my updated novel does this.
I used my wages as an 18-year-old factory hand to establish the small press that published The God Squad. Forty-six years later, I’m still involved in publishing. In all that time, Suffer the Little Children (subtitled “The Inside Story of Ireland's Industrial Schools”) is the most important book I played any part in publishing.
It is the definitive history of all religious-run institutions. The forensic use of official documents and the diligent investigative work by the authors left no room for dispute about the cruel systems of control which religious orders exercised over women and children trapped in their care with the acquiescence of the state. It shows the world that my character, Sean Blake, is saved from by being adopted by loving parents and told nothing about his identity.
Up until the late sixties in Ireland, thousands of young children were sent to what were called industrial schools, financed by the Department of Education, and operated by various religious orders of the Catholic Church. Popular belief held that these schools were orphanages or detention centers, when in reality most of the children ended up at the schools because their parents were too poor to care for them. Mary Raftery's award-winning three-part TV series on the industrial schools, "States of Fear", shocked Ireland when broadcast on RTE in 1999, prompting an unprecedented response in Ireland - hundreds of people phoned…
