Raising Children to Thrive: A Workbook and Guide for Responsive, Sensitive Parenting

Beginning at birth, your child innately requires (and expects) your responsiveness, warmth, nurturance, touch, voice, caring, and protection. It is about survival, feeling safe, loved, and cared for. Neglect of such expected maternal needs inhibits the potential for healthy social and emotional development.

This dynamic manual provides everything you need to make the Responsive, Sensitive Parenting (RSP) model work for you and your child. Using strategies based in science and real-world evidence is the surest way to help your child to thrive.

THIS RSP THIRTY-DAY SELF-ASSESSMENT TRAINING MANUAL PROVIDES:

- Key insights into the actions and attributes most essential to Responsive, Sensitive Parenting

- A greater awareness of your current skillset as a parent, grandparent, or caregiver

- A guide to creating a daily, weekly, monthly, and lifetime plan that will help you become an expert in understanding the meaning of your child's unique mind, cues, and behaviors.

- Cues to help you practice daily compassion and empathy.

- Self-assessments to guide you toward becoming more sensitive and caring of yourself and your child.

The focus in these pages is on developing an intersubjective, genuine, mutual, and collaborative I-Thou relationship with the child in your life. The exercises help you practice the essential core attributes and parent-child interactions that children need to satiate their hunger for affect, stimulate their brain cells, and develop the necessary attachment bond. All of this will allow your child to gain the necessary psychological resources-a conscience, a sense of empathy, a sense of play, and verbal stimulation social skills and reading.

Ronald Ruff, PhD, began working with children and parents in 1969. He started his private practice in 1974 and continued until 2017. During that time, he worked with a diverse range of age groups; cultural, educational, socioeconomic, and racial backgrounds; and diagnostic classifications, garnering extensive experience in psychological treatment, assessment, and consultation in health care, education, government, judicial systems, training, teaching, and research.Dr. Ruff was awarded a fellowship to the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry and Cambridge Hospital, Center for Addictive Studies. He served as Clinical Director of a residential treatment center for children, as Chief Psychologist of a community mental health center, on the staff of several psychiatric hospitals, as a juvenile court psychologist, as Director of Clinical Internship Training, and as an adjunct instructor who taught psychology doctoral students. He received a BA in Psychology with French studies from Oberlin College, an MS in Counseling Psychology from George Williams College, and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Illinois Institute of Technology. He has been married for fifty-three years and has three daughters and four grandchildren.