STRESSED FAMILY, STRONG FAMILY
A brand-new e-book
Sent immediately from the Internet to your computer.

Keywords: family strengths, stress, family stress, stressed out, traumatic stress, strengths, crisis coping, coping, resilience, teens, emotional stress, psychiatry, school problems, parenting, children, kids, treatment, counseling, e-book

What this book could do for you:
    Stressed Family, Strong Family could help you focus more on strengths-- what’s right with your kids, your partner, and yourself.
    You might find that problems don’t seem as big, if you can begin to see strengths you may have overlooked.
    “But we’re already coping”
    You and your family or class are probably already coping with stress. But you may feel you could do better.
Better coping comes from resilience.
Resilience means handling
    Unexpected challenges
    Crises
    Disasters
Resilience means better teamwork, with your kids, your spouse, your partner, or your class.
Resilience means that
    You learn from past challenges
    You can use all of your abilities in a new situation
    You don’t get overwhelmed by most difficulties.
Increased understanding of resilience for kids, parents, and other adults could be one click away.
Stressed Family, Strong Family brings you a lot of information about resilience and coping with crises. You will find quiz items in this e-book, items that help you pinpoint the strengths you need.

More Information about the book
We're all coping
    With stressful times
    With high prices
    With unexpected illness or disaster
Kids and families under stress need support, courage, wisdom, and money. They also need hope: hope that things will get better, hope that keeps them striving until they have overcome the challenges.
Stressed Family, Strong Family is for those who want to help their family or their class:
By following guidelines and answering quiz items that could lead to better coping. Better coping could bring back hope, hope that may have faded in a crisis.

Good Stress or Bad Stress?
Let's spend a moment on good stress and bad stress.
Good stress makes you feel excited, stimulated, and challenged to master the situation. If you are lucky, you have the support of a caring family or friends. If you are lucky, you have enough time, money, and coping skills to meet the situation head-on.

Under bad stress, kids get uptight, lose sleep, don't do as well on tests. They may have symptoms like stomachaches, headaches, or temper outbursts. Feeling stressed, their emotions get the best of them. Parents, brothers and sisters, and classmates may begin to react under bad stress.
If a new family crisis like illness or marital strife piles on top of an earlier stress, the kids need to struggle even harder. Ongoing bad stress plus that new crisis can equal disaster.
And your emotions may get the best of you. You may fail to control your temper when you ought to stay calm. You may give in to kids’ demands, when you know you shouldn't.
The whole family or class begins to suffer. If the parent has a partner, they may argue about how to cope. They start blaming each other, or themselves, or their kids. Kids get more upset when they hear harsh words between adults. If the stress hits a classroom, teachers go home exhausted from their daily struggle.

Tried everything?
You've probably tried everything you can think of. You may have read what some experts have to say.
The key to coping with bad stress is resilience: meeting a stressful situation and keeping on with your life. Experts agree that focusing on strengths can be an important support to resilience.
Stressed Family, Strong Family enables kids and families to spell out the strengths they already enjoy, and pinpoint the abilities they need in order to cope better.

CONTENTS of Stressed Family, Strong Family

Chapters 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3
The Resilience Checklists
These three chapters suggest ways you can help your son, daughter, or pupil increase their resilience. You will be helping them to cope better with stress as you look at key ideas from around the globe.

Chapter 4
Help Me Cope: A Quiz for Kids and Teens
Help Me Cope shows where your kids or pupils want adult guidance in order to cope better with stress. You go over their answers with them. You and the youth can then read suggestions about ways to increase coping abilities. (Adults can also answer the questions for themselves.)

Chapter 5
How Families or Schools Cope with a Crisis
Family coping is not the same as individual coping. A whole family or a class needs different skills when the crisis affects everybody. Read about those skills here.

Chapter 6
Recycle Your Family
I don’t mean throw them out with the trash. I want to help you learn about vicious cycles like
Arguing
Nagging
Shirking chores
Avoiding homework
Fighting
Scapegoating.
You can learn a different way of looking at patterns you may have struggled with, and some ways of getting untangled from vicious cycles.

Chapter 7
370 Strengths
You’ll find here the longest list of strengths and assets I’ve ever seen. I encourage you to shift your attention away from problems and stress. This list can help you identify strengths you may have lost sight of, or never noticed, in your kids, pupils, and family.

Chapter 8
Acute Stress Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
These more serious conditions are important to understand. You may know someone who struggles with flashbacks and other symptoms when they recall a painful event. Chapter 8 describes what kids or adults go through when they have strong and longer-lasting emotional reactions to stress or trauma.

The Appendix
In the Appendix, I’ve included a list of about 130 kinds of stress, on the List Of Bad Things Or Stresses. This list shows the great variety of difficulties encountered by kids and families, all over the world. The List of Bad Things suggests strengths that could be useful in coping with particular stresses.
You’ll also find a list of websites and other information, including links to the sites of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, which each have a large number of free pamphlets on common problems and more serious illnesses. For example the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has a large number of pamphlets in English, Spanish, and other languages.
(See http://www.aacap.org/cs/root/facts_for_families/facts_for_families)


About the Author:

I’m a recently-retired Connecticut psychiatrist specializing in children, adolescents, and families. My work included evaluation and treatment in hospitals, day programs, clinics and my private office. I’ve counseled youth and families struggling with depression, psychosis, drug and alcohol abuse, attention deficit disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, and emotional reactions to the confusion and stress of their lives. I have found psychiatric medication for patients to be either helpful and harmful, depending on the situation and the side effects.
I’ve also written about confusion in governments and corporations (see www.AmericanConfusion.com.)