cover image The Yes Brain: How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity, and Resilience in Your Child

The Yes Brain: How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity, and Resilience in Your Child

Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson. Bantam, $27 (208p) ISBN 978-0-399-59466-3

Siegel and Bryson dive deeper into the ideas introduced in their bestselling The Whole-Brain Child to offer parents the tools needed to develop a child’s “yes brain”—a receptive state of mind that encourages curiosity, compassion, and adaptation, qualities identified here as critical life skills that will lead children to “do more, learn more, and become more.” Buoyed by neuroscientific research, Siegel and Bryson’s plan focuses on fostering four crucial components of resilience—balance, resilience, insight, and empathy, with a single chapter devoted to each—and extols the importance of nurturing these traits while helping your child integrate all in order to “live meaningfully and find success.” Each of these chapters concludes with cartoons illustrating that section’s content that are meant to be shared with children, as well as tips to promote the same traits in oneself as a parent and individual. Siegel and Bryson have taken a high-level concept and broken it down into an approach that is easy to understand and implement. Parents, grandparents, teachers, clinicians, and other caregivers will find something in the plan that they can use to help the children in their care to excel. (Jan. 2018)