Actually, You're Fine (A Compassionate, Practical Approach to Maximizing Your Child's Potential in a World of Overdiagnosis)

How can we best help our kids to succeed without over-pathologizing common childhood behavior? How do we make sure that we don't mistake pressure to achieve with pressure to diagnose our kids? Clinical neuropsychologist and mom Dr. Katie Davis tackles these timely and urgent questions with empathy, experience, and clear practical guidance. 

With more information and resources than ever, neurodiversity and learning disabilities are now being met with an unprecedented frankness, openness, and acceptance. This new wave is timely and necessary, but what happens when achievement culture and diagnoses clash? What happens when parents’ desires to help their kids results in pathologizing standard behaviors across the spectrum of kid-dom? The resulting trend in over-diagnosis hurts everyone.

Dr. Katie Davis provides psychotherapy and cognitive remediation to kids of all ages with learning disorders and related developmental disorders daily. Continuously, she has noticed that parents often mistake regular behavior with a problem that needs a diagnosis. In Actually You're Fine, Dr. Davis examines the tendency for children and their parents to interpret everyday experiences as signs of neurodivergence. This groundbreaking book encourages important discussions surrounding child development and advocates for a more nuanced and compassionate approach to maximizing children’s potential in today's complex world. Using a multidisciplinary lens to explain the ways in which over-diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders distorts perceptions of health and illness, Davis explores the intersection of psychology, sociology, and culture. Not only does she show the detrimental consequences of this phenomenon, she offers clear-eyed and empathetic practical takeaways to help parents, caregivers, and educators a guide to helping their kids succeed without pathologizing them—while still being able to recognize if a child does need an intervention.

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