Books
If you buy any of these items using the links that I provide, it costs you absolutely nothing and it helps me to add more recommendations to this list.
Brain Development
Parenting Skills
Anxious Children
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Depression
Autism Spectrum
Mindfulness
Brain Development
Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnik is one of my favorite writers. Her research explores how young children come to know about the world around them. The work is informed by the “theory theory”–the idea that children develop and change intuitive theories of the world in much the way that scientists do! I love that hypothesis. She also studied how young children learn across different knowledge domains, including physical, biological and psychological. In collaboration with computer scientists, she used the Bayes Net formalism to help explain how children are able to learn causal structure from patterns of data, and her team has demonstrated that young children have much more powerful causal learning mechanisms than was previously supposed.
John Medina
John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist who studied the isolation and characterization of genes involved in human brain development and the genetics of psychiatric disorders. He is the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University and he is a columnist for the Psychiatric Times.
Daniel J. Siegel is someone whose work I have read extensively. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center. He developed the field of Interpersonal Neurobiology (still nascent), which is “an interdisciplinary view of life experience that draws on over a dozen branches of science to create a framework for understanding of our subjective and interpersonal lives.”
Tina Payne Bryson
Dana L. Suskind
Dana L. Suskind is a Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center and founder and co-director of its Center for Early Learning & Public Health. She specializes in early childhood development with an emphasis on brain development for children aged birth to three, particularly those born into poverty.
Parenting Skills
Simone Davies
Simone Davies is a Montessori teacher who trained through the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) and is a former Montessori student herself. She runs parent-child classes at Jacaranda Tree Montessori in Amsterdam and has been working in Montessori education for 15+ years. She also helps to set up homes Montessori-style.
Janet Lansbury
Janet Lansbury follows Magda Gerber’s child care philosophy. Magda Gerber was the founder of Resources for Infant Educarers, usually referred to as RIE, an organization that continues to teach her educaring ideas to parents and caregivers. Their philosophy is different from Montessori, although the two share some similarities (i.e. their ideal of respecting infants and treating a baby as a person from the beginning).
Anxious Children
Margaret E. Blaustein
Margaret E. Blaustein, PhD, is a practicing clinical psychologist and Director of the Center for Trauma Training in Needham, Massachusetts. With an emphasis on the importance of understanding the child-, the family-, and the provider-in-context, her studies have focused on identification and translation of key principles of intervention across treatment settings.
And her book by the way – includes 79 reproducible handouts and forms, so all you child therapists, go for it.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Tamar Chansky
Tamar Chansky is a licensed Psychologist and the Founder and Director of the Children’s and Adult Center for OCD and Anxiety in Plymouth Meeting, PA. She is one of few psychologists who writes extensively on the treatment and prevention of anxiety and stress in children, teens and adults. She has blogs on The Huffington Post and Psychology Today.
Depression
Autism Spectrum
Mindfulness
