Baltimore, MD—Despite the traditional impression of childhood as a carefree time, young children, just like their overworked parents, often experience stress. Separation anxiety, jealousy over a sibling, bullying from a classmate, or a difficult task all serve as sources for stress. And unlike adults, young children are often ill-equipped to deal with life's pressures, resulting in angry outbursts, defiant behaviors, and long-lasting negative impacts on their learning and development. Helping young children cope with stress is critical to their academic, social, and emotional success. A new book for early childhood professionals, Little Kids, Big Worries: Stress-Busting Tips for Early Childhood Classrooms (Brookes Publishing, 2010), makes this important responsibility easier.

Authored by celebrated early childhood expert Alice Sterling Honig, Ph.D., Little Kids, Big Worries guides teachers in recognizing and responding to stress in young children before pressures turn into big problems. "A teacher's response to stress is crucial! Children learn best when they feel safe, supported, and loved. How responsively attuned the teacher is to each individual child's needs is the most important ingredient of quality child care, not the number of toys or how fancy the room is," explains Dr. Honig.

This new book helps preschool teachers identify signs of stress, such as frequent avoidance of eye contact, compulsive thumb-sucking, violent outbursts, and bullying. The resource also presents teachers with a variety of effective, innovative, and clinically-validated strategies for reducing children's stress. Teachers can choose strategies for each individual child, such as spending lap time sharing books about a child with a similar worry who was helped to feel better or storing a photo book in the child's cubby so that he or she can cheer up by looking at pictures of loved ones. Teachers can also adopt techniques that work with groups of children, including setting aside group time to talk about feelings, encouraging children's ideas about how to resolve fusses and make friends in the group, and pounding dough for baking to get out mad feelings. Recognizing that teachers often experience stress as well, Little Kids, Big Worries also provides invaluable tips for adults to use both inside and outside the classroom.

Packed with beneficial techniques for early childhood teachers, practitioners, and families, Little Kids, Big Worries has been praised by experts in the early childhood field. Dr. Edward Zigler, Ph.D., Director Emeritus of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy states that Dr. Honig "provides practitioners with those tools required to reduce young children's stress, which we know to be a major barrier to children's optimal education." Early childhood consultant Sue Bredekamp, Ph.D., believes the book "strikes the perfect balance between reducing stress and protecting children from harm while also promoting their coping skills and resilience."

Little Kids, Big Worries: Stress-Busting Tips for Early Childhood Classrooms is available from Brookes Publishing (1-800-638-3775; www.brookespublishing.com).

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Little Kids, Big Worries
Stress-Busting Tips for Early Childhood Classrooms
by Alice Sterling Honig, Ph.D. (Brookes Publishing, 2010) $24.95; 184 pages; 6 x 9 paperback; ISBN 978-1-59857-061-8

Review copies available upon request. Please contact Amy Perkins at 410-337-9580 x128 or aperkins@brookespublishing.com.

About the Authors:

Alice Sterling Honig, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Child Development at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She is the author of 13 books and almost 500 journal articles. For more than 40 years, Dr. Honig has taught courses in child development, parenting, quality caregiving with infants and toddlers, and theories of child development. Every spring, Dr. Honig directs the National Quality Infant/Toddler Caregiving Workshop. A special Early Childhood Lifetime Achievement Award was presented in 2004 to Dr. Honig by the Syracuse Association for the Education of Young Children. In 2005, Dr. Honig received a Champion of Children Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York State Association for the Education of Young Children.

About Brookes Publishing:

For more than 30 years, Brookes Publishing has been a leading provider of resources on child development, early intervention, education, disabilities, communication and language, behavior, and mental health. An independent company, Brookes Publishing is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. Please visit www.brookespublishing.com to learn more.