Anna Housley Juster, PhD, LICSW is a licensed child and adolescent mental health clinician, education consultant, and award-winning author with over twenty-five years of experience supporting children and families. Dr. Housley Juster began her career as a Head Start teacher and spent many years working in curriculum development across formal and informal contexts including schools, museums, libraries, and children’s educational media. For several years, Dr. Housley Juster served as director of content at Sesame Workshop overseeing curriculum development for the Sesame Street series and product development across the brand.
The amygdala in How to Train Your Amygdala makes complicated concepts accessible to children so they can understand their bodies, practice impulse control, and boost their self-regulation. Throughout the book, the amygdala and the reader practice anxiety-calming and mindfulness strategies such as deep breathing, visualization, and progressive relaxation. With anxiety on the rise among children, learning how to calm the amygdala is a critical life skill.
In The Best Good Thing, nothing is going well. The young narrator sharing about her day is feeling sad and mad. Smad! She knows there are no good things about the day. Her mother listens, sympathizes, and suggests intentionally looking for positives. The story becomes a relatable search for good things, which are all around. A flower, a kind neighbor, yummy bread. Ultimately, she discovers the best good thing of all: love.
