Face to Face: Cultivating Kids’ Social Lives in Today’s Digital World
“ . . . a great go-to guide for parents, educators, and counseling professionals to foster empathy, connection, and emotional resiliency in today’s youth.” This book addresses healthy friendships as well as peer mistreatment and offers tools and tips for dealing with the dilemma of digital media and connecting deeply with kids.
Order Face to Face now—and start cultivating your kids’ social lives today!
Raising children is like an odyssey, full of wonder and woes, triumphs and trials. As parents, counselors, grandparents, and other caring adults, we lovingly strive to support our children to become competent, caring, and responsible adults with fulfilling relationships, and our job is not always easy. We live in a world heavily guided by media and technology, with “screens” increasingly competing for our time and attention.
Fostering face-to-face relationships continues to be the surest path to family happiness, vital friendships, individual fulfillment, and a caring society! To ensure that the significant value of face-to-face relationship is not lost, this guidebook advocates for mindfulness, learning, and networking with others.
Face to Face was written by a team of pediatricians, educators, counselors and parents with a foreword by noted bullying expert Stan Davis. It offers an overview of current ideas and research in the fields of child development, brain science, and parenting that can help to inform parenting choices. Topics covered in the book include:
Friendship Starts at Home
Outside Influences including Consumerism and Lookism, Gender Stereotyping, and Overuse of Digital Technology
Navigating Friendship and Social Groups
Peer Mistreatment
Fostering Resilience
Because our authors know that sometimes we feel lost and are unsure of ourselves as caregivers, we also feature in Face to Face six special “touchstones” that research shows to be important for healthy and authentic living. These are scattered throughout the book for guidance.
Organized as a discussion guide, the book consists of seven chapters that can be used as the curriculum for seven discussion group meetings. Each chapter begins with an overview of topics related to various aspects of kids’ social lives. Then we supplement the overviews with related articles and conclude with discussion questions, suggestions on how to take action, and additional resources. Using the book as a discussion guide can be a powerful way to build strong connections with other parents and will go a long way toward affirming your personal values and strengthening your personal support system.
Order Face to Face now—and start cultivating your kids’ social lives today!
”This book is a vital resource for all parents, educators, health care providers and those who work with, or live in proximity to, children. Jam packed with wisdom, resources, and creative ideas, Face to Face provides a complete tool kit for facilitating childhoods that are rich with embodied experience, healthy relationships, and hearty cognitive and emotional development. With topics ranging from the impact of technology to how gender influences a child’s development to the development of resilience, the authors have gleaned the best resources available and put them in one place for easy accessibility. I will be gifting this book to everyone I know who is important in the life of a child.”
DOREEN DODGEN-MAGEE, Psy.D., psychologist and nationally known speaker focusing on the importance of intentionality regarding media and technology engagement
“A timely, practical, and easy-to-read resource for parents. It’s geared to exactly what today’s families struggle with. I want every parent I know to read this remarkable guide.”
WILLIAM DOHERTY, Ph.D., Professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota and author of The Intentional Family
“Face to Face is . . . filled with comprehensive information, invaluable ideas, and extraordinary guidance for every daunting responsibility of parenthood and care-giving. It should be required reading for everyone who has contact with children. Truly, this book is a tremendous gift to our society, and I know it will be used for generations to come.”
SUELLEN FRIED, founder of BullySafeUSA and author of Bullies, Targets & Witnesses, Banishing Bullying Behavior, and 30 Activities for Getting Better at Getting Along
Hi! I’m Dr. Kathy. Welcome to my website! Although Family Empowerment Network is formally closed, we want to keep these resources available to you. Our belief is that parents are the most wise and intuitive about what is best for their children. However, parents sometimes need the support of effective, timeless, compassionate parenting information and strategies. On this website you will find our three parenting books on boys, girls, and kids’ social lives and ten years of monthly newsletter articles. In addition, a powerful, under-recognized resource is the support of other parents. Here you will find how to use our books as discussion guides for monthly self-led parenting groups. One last resource: I am still available to give talks and workshops.
