Playground Politics is the first book to look at the neglected middle years of childhood--from kindergarten to junior high--and to help parents understand the enormous emotional challenges these children are facing. In witty, vivid stories, Dr. Greenspan brings to life the major emotional milestones of these years, when children move from the shelter of the family to the harsh rivalries of "playground politics," and toward an independent self image. His empathy for the turmoil children bring home from school, and for the parents who try to help, is deep and reassuring.

Most children fall into five basic personality types that stem from inborn physical characteristics: the sensitive child, the self-absorbed child, the defiant child, the inattentive child, and the active/aggressive child. Stanley Greenspan, M.D., is the first to show parents how to match their parenting to the challenges of their particular child. He identifies and vividly describes these five universal temperaments and then, with great empathy, shows parents how each of these children actually experiences the world and how to use daily childrearing to enhance an individual child's strengths...

In the childhood of every human being and at the dawn of human history there is an amazing and, until now, unexplained leap from simple genetically programmed behavior to language, symbolic thinking, and culture. In The First Idea, Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker explore this missing link and offer brilliant new insights into two longstanding questions: how human beings first create symbols and how these abilities evolved and were transmitted across generations over millions of years. From fascinating research into the intelligence of both human infants and apes, they identify...

This compelling book reveals the six fundamental levels that form the architecture of our minds. The growth of these levels, four of which are deeper even than the unconscious, depends on a series of critical but subtle emotional transactions between an infant and a devoted caregiver. In mapping these interactions, Dr. Greenspan formulates the elusive building blocks of creative and analytic thinking and provides an exciting missing link between recent discoveries in neuroscience and the qualities that make us most fully human. He also sounds a warning: these mind-building experiences are...

Every parent wants to raise a bright, happy, and moral child, but until Stanley Greenspan investigated the building blocks of cognitive, social, emotional, and moral development, no one could show parents how and when these qualities begin. In this book Dr. Greenspan, the internationally admired child psychiatrist, identifies the six key experiences that enable children to reach their full potential. In Building Healthy Minds, he draws upon discoveries made in his research and practice as he describes the many ways in which games, fantasy play, and conversations with and without words...

What do babies and young children really need? For the first time, two famed advocates for children cut through all the theories, platitudes, and controversies that surround parenting advice to define what every child must have in the first years of life. They lay out the seven irreducible needs of any child, in any society, and confront such thorny questions as: How much time do children need one-on-one with a parent? What is the effect of shifting caregivers, of custody arrangements? Why are we knowingly letting children fail in school? Nothing is off limits. This short, hard-hitting book,...

Internationally recognized for his brilliant insights into the emotional and intellectual development of infants and young children, Dr. Stanley Greenspan now shows how this can best be encouraged within the real lives of parents today. Recognizing that day care, for the most part, does not provide the intense one-to-one nurturing that children need in the first few years, he offers a radical redefinition of family life. Without suggesting that either parent give up a career, he presents a wide variety of practical solutions, including the "four-thirds solution" (in which both parents work...

In this warmly supportive book, Dr. Stanley Greenspan offers a set of guiding principles to help parents of children-from preschoolers to teenagers-so that they feel secure in their homes, their schools, and in their community at large. He also illuminates the often subtle shifts in children's behavior that signal reaction to current stress and fears and gives parents concrete suggestions to help children handle their anxieties. The Secure Child will help families everywhere move toward the common goal of a more stable and secure future.

The Learning Tree offers a new understanding of learning problems. Rather than looking just at symptoms, this new approach describes how to find the missing developmental steps that cause these symptoms. The best solution to the problem comes from knowing what essential skills to strengthen.Using the metaphor of a tree, Dr. Stanley Greenspan explains that the roots represent how children take in the world through what they hear, see, smell, and touch. The trunk represents thinking skills through which children grow both academically and socially. From these, the branches-children's...