This invaluable guide from bestselling author and pediatrican Kenneth Ginsburg, MD, FAAP, offers coping strategies to help children and teens deal with stress due to academic pressure, high achievement standards, media messages, peer pressure, and family tension. Recommendations guide parents to help kids from the age of 18 months to 18 years build the seven crucial "C's"-competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control-needed to bounce back from life's challenges. This book provides a wide range of tactics, including building on natural strengths, fostering hope and optimism, avoiding risky behaviors, and taking care of oneself physically and emotionally. This edition includes new chapters on the topic of grit, stress and how how one's perception of stress affects what stress really is, toxic stress, and the protective role of nurturant adults. It also addresses the issue of adolescents responding to stress by either indulging in unhealthy behaviors or giving up completely, and the suggested solutions are aimed at strengthening resilience.

Kenneth R. Ginsburg, MD, MS Ed, FAAP, is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and practices adolescent medicine at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He is coauthor of Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond and author of But I'm Almost 13!" An Action Plan for Raising a Responsible Adolescent. He is the father of 2 children and lives in Philadelphia.