Synopses & Reviews
The average fifth-grade girl knows a cutter, a classmate with Asperger's syndrome, or has a friend with two fathers. Issues like these are big, and they are just drops in the bucket. A generation ago, we worried more about kidnapping and divorce than cyberbullying and prescription-drug abuse. With little personal experience in the new, complex issues that plague our daughters on a daily basis, how can parents today help their girls cope better and raise a generation of girls who are resilient and self-confident instead of insecure and confused? This book answers that question with concrete action steps and easy-to-follow talking points that help parents keep the lines of communication open and better support their daughters.
Author Erin A. Munroe, LMHC, who has been counseling adolescents for more than a decade, is in a unique position to help parents understand how girls cope and react to stressors and adult-size problems today, so they can be active and effective participants in their daughters' reality. When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls also helps parents learn about themselves and control their own emotional responses to the big issues their daughters face, including:
· Sexuality, sexual orientation, STDs, and pregnancy
· Mental health issues and learning disabilities
· Bullying, peer pressure, and cyberbullying
· School anxiety, social anxiety, and other phobias
· Substance use and abuse and the newest addictions
· High expectations for young girls that often cost them their childhood
Raising girls is a big responsibility. Let When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls become your twenty-first-century parenting strategy and give your daughter the gift of resiliency and confidence that she is deserving and capable of experiencing.
Review
No one stays a child forever. "When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls: How to Prepare, React and Manage Your Emotions, So You Can Best Support Your Daughter" is a guide for parents to understanding the challenges of their own child coming into age and how to best manage these issues pertaining to sexuality, adulthood, substance abuse, and how to remember to let one's child be a child in this massive and scary world. "When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls" is a thoughtful and driven read with plenty of wisdom, highly recommended.
--The Midwest Book Review The Midwest Book Review
Synopsis
Nothing since Reviving Ophelia (and the dozens of copycats that came after) has garnered widespread attention or addressed on a large scale the tremendous responsibility and challenges of raising girls. But that was sixteen years ago. When Big Issues Happens to Little Girls provides new help for a whole new generation of parents. It is not another book on "raising girls," or the psychology of girls, or of eating disorders, and body issues. We know those are symptoms and coping mechanisms of greater things, and When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls poses the question Why are our girls not able to cope?
About the Author
Erin Munroe, LMHC, is the author of the upcoming
From Stressing Out to Chilling Out: The Anxiety Workbook for
Girls (Fairview Press, 2010). She is also the author of the newly published
The Everything Guide to Stepparenting: Practical, Reassuring Advice for Creating Healthy, Long-Lasting Relationships (Adams Media, 2009, with credited technical reviewer Irene Levine, Ph.D.).
Currently, Erin works as a licensed mental health counselor at the South Boston Community Health Center. She sees children, adolescents, and families experiencing a range of issues--including trauma, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorders, adjustment disorders, and more. Erin's position at the health center started as a part-time position in their confidential teen clinic, where Erin still provides counseling and support to teenagers struggling with everything from college applications to talking to their parents about pregnancy.
Erin has worked in the mental health field since 2001. She has worked with adolescents in schools as a licensed school guidance counselor and adjustment counselor, and outside of school as a licensed mental health counselor. She dedicated herself to the field after working with a program whose goal was to reunite families whose children had been taken away due to abuse and neglect. A major portion of this job was educating parents on how to be the best parents they could be. The rewarding part was watching parents and guardians implement these strategies and gain success as a family unit.
Following this experience, Erin attended Boston University where she earned her graduate degree in mental health counseling and behavioral medicine. As an undergraduate, Erin attended the College of the Holy Cross, where she majored in English and completed significant coursework in deaf studies.
Erin also provides trainings in self-care, relaxation, life balance, and identifying and managing mental illness in the classroom.Author of The Big Book of Parenting Solutions