The Strength Switch: How The New Science of Strength-Based Parenting Can Help Your Child and Your Teen to Flourish

by Lea Waters

Overview

Unlock your children’s potential by helping them build their strengths.

This game-changing book shows us the extraordinary results of focusing on our children’s strengths rather than always trying to correct their weaknesses. Most parents struggle with this shift because they suffer from a negativity bias, thanks to evolutionary development, giving them “strengths-blindness.” By showing us how to throw the “strengths switch,” Lea Waters demonstrates how we can not only help our children build resilience, optimism, and achievement but we can also help inoculate them against today’s pandemic of depression and anxiety.
           
As a strengths-based scientist for more than twenty years, ten of them spent focusing on strengths-based parenting, Waters has seen how this approach enhances self-esteem and energy in both children and teenagers. Yet more on the plus side: parents find it a particularly exciting and rewarding way to raise children. With many suggestions for specific ways to interact with your kids, Waters demonstrates how to discover strengths and talents in our children, how to use positive emotions as a resource, how to build strong brains, and even how to deal with problem behaviors and talk about difficult situations and emotions. As revolutionary yet simple as Mindset and Grit, The Strength Switch will show parents how a small shift can yield enormous results.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101983645
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Lea Waters, Ph.D., is President of the International Positive Psychology Association and the Gerry Higgins Chair in Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She holds an affiliate position with Cambridge University’s Well-being Institute (UK) and the Center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan (USA). Waters was the Founding Director of the Centre for Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne and was listed in the Top 100 Women of Influence by The Australian Financial Review in 2015. She has also served as a consultant to a wide range of businesses. Waters lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her husband, Matthew Scholes; her son, Nicholas; and her daughter, Emily.

Read an Excerpt

Martin Seligman is widely known as a leading authority on positive psychology, a branch of psychology that scientifically studies how positive emotions, strengths, and virtues help us thrive. I had met Marty when he came to Australia to establish a positive psychology approach at a school near the University of Melbourne, where I work. I had just transferred to the Melbourne Graduate School of Education from the School of Business and Economics, where as an organizational psychologist I’d been studying and consulting for organizations on integrating positive psychology into the workplace, particularly on how focusing on strengths as opposed to weaknesses could improve performance. Basically, I’d swapped offices for classrooms, senior execs for teachers, and workers for school kids. I was also leading the establishment of our Centre for Positive Psychology, a dedicated facility that was a first for Australia, for the university, and for me.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Strength Switch"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Lea Waters.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Part 1 Laying the Foundation 1

Chapter 1 Standing for Strength in a World Obsessed with Weakness 3

Chapter 2 The Strength Switch 39

Chapter 3 Understanding Strengths 59

Chapter 4 The Ages and Stages of Strength Growth 97

Part 2 Building Strengths 125

Chapter 5 Attention, Savoring, Gratitude, and Goofing Off 127

Chapter 6 Mindfulness 161

Chapter 7 Self-Control 201

Chapter 8 Communication 225

Chapter 9 Strength-Based Living in the Real World 249

Chapter 10 Strong Selves, Strong Families, Strong Communities, Strong World 279

Acknowledgments 295

Appendix: Further Resources and Reading 301

Endnotes 307

Index 329

Editorial Reviews

04/17/2017
The framework of positive psychology, combined with recent studies into strength, yields here a parenting method that ditches a culturally dominant negativity bias in which parents are focused on correcting weaknesses. Psychologist Avery encourages parents to “flick the switch” by instead focusing on acknowledging and building on their children’s strengths so that their children develop self-esteem, optimism, resilience, and self-control. Waters teaches parents to identify their children’s strengths at the intersection of spontaneous high performance, high energy, and high use, and then to find natural opportunities for these strengths to be used and developed. She sketches out a framework that considers problematic behaviors as resulting from overuse or underuse of strengths. Waters also offers parents and children alike methods for achieving other aspects of positive psychology—attention, gratitude, and mindfulness. Despite the focus on positivity, Waters comes off as a thoughtful parenting realist and not a spacey happiness guru, supporting her ideas with a mix of parental anecdotes and pointers to psychological research. Waters’s clearly presented, easily implemented ideas will make sense to parents looking to escape the corrective mind-set that can make both them and their children feel defective or broken, especially in the children’s teen years. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Waters comes off as a thoughtful parenting realist…supporting her ideas with a mix of parental anecdotes and pointers to psychological research.”
—Publishers Weekly 

“As parents, we often obsess about fixing our children’s weaknesses and neglect the importance of developing their strengths. This book is full of concrete ideas on how to change that.”
—Adam Grant, PhD, New York Times–bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take
 
"Practical tips for parents from the wise and wonderful Lea Waters! So many parents, including me, struggle to translate scientific research into real-world strategies. This terrific book not only helps us understand ourselves and our children better but also makes that understanding actionable!" 
—Angela Duckworth, PhD, author of the New York Times bestseller Grit
 
“The Strength Switch gives parents hope that they can build their children’s creativity. By sharing parts of her own story of overcoming hardship, and presenting the latest science of positive psychology, Dr. Waters not only inspires parents to bring out the best in their children, but she inspires us all to be the best version of ourselves. A wise and warm book!”
—Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, co-author of Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind
 
“Lea Waters points to a needed shift in the way we are parenting our children and teenagers. The Strength Switch rejects the current fad that drowns children in self-esteem and replaces it with research-based practices to help parents identify and develop their children’s best qualities. Inspiring and timely.”
—Robert Biswas-Diener, PhD, author of The Upside of Your Dark Side
 
“This book will help you do something groundbreaking for your children—shift your view to see their best and help them develop their unique strengths. Follow the wisdom here and you will bring deep, lasting benefit to not only your child but yourself. Thanks to Dr. Lea Waters, strengths-based parenting has arrived!”
—Ryan M. Niemiec, PsyD, author of Character Strengths Interventions
 
“Lea Waters’s expertise, hope, and heart shine through the pages of The Strength Switch. She deftly draws on the science of positive emotions to help readers appreciate the vital role positivity plays in moving through hard times. This book will be a game-changer for unlocking your child’s potential.”
—Barbara L. Fredrickson, PhD, author of Positivity and Love 2.0

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