Barbara Klein, Ed.D.

I will be at the Book Fair from 1:30 - 4:30pm on Sunday, September 30, 2012.

(on the West Hollywood Writes table on the street level F 1-8, on the portico, next to the News and Views room)

Hope to see you there!

I came across this facinating blog:

http://toolboxoftemperaments.typepad.com/

Bibliotherapy for families and their young children

"As a mother of two young children, teacher, and librarian, I am always on the look out for quality literature to help children maneuver through their daily array of emotions. I am very lucky to be friends with savvy parents, bibliophiles, and early childhood professionals. Whether talking  about anger, a new sibling, or sportsmanship, I have found children's literature to help act as the catalyst to  the conversations we should be having with our children.

Although  I envision this blog to focus on bibliotherapy for parents and children, I don't want to limit our discussions to just lists of books. I have come across great websites, games, and DVDs as well.  I look forward to hearing about what books, games, or resources have worked for your family.  Some of the resources may not speak to you or your children. That is OK. No two "Toolboxes of Temperaments" will be alike since our children are all unique and special individuals. Hurdles that my family have had to overcome may not resonate with yours. Glean what you need from this, share your thoughts and suggestions, and remember to celebrate your child today!"

"My name is Matthew and I just finished the John Hopkins Summer Institute for the Gifted located at UCLA. There were some good things and bad things with this camp. One of the good things was that I enjoyed having in depth conversations with kids like me. I made a couple friends and exchanged emails, but they all live in other states or other countries. The food at the college dining hall was really good. The class topics were limited to ones that didn’t interest me, and I found the classes and the running of the camp much disorganized. I would not recommend this camp to my friends and I will not go back. But I like the idea of taking camps with other kids like me and I will try other ones with a specific subject that interests me and possibly more local kids."

Matthew – age 10

School starts early this year for most kids, which means now is the time to start talking with your child about going back to school. Perhaps your child may not want to discuss school with you but I would keep talking about it anyway.
 
Here are some topics:
1. Have you missed school?
2. What friends are you looking forward to seeing?
3. What was your favorite summer activity?
4. What was the hardest part of summer break?
5. What will you tell your friends about your summer holiday?
6. We need to get you to bed earlier!
7. What new clothes do you think you would like for school when we purchase your school supplies?
8. Let’s make a play date with an old friend from school.


Dear Parents,

I am so enthusiastic to announce the launch of my new tutoring program for gifted children. Helping raise well-adjusted highly exceptional and talented children has been a lifelong journey for me. As a child I watched my mother struggle with raising my genius brother. She hailed the importance of her son being a boy wonder and getting his Ph.D. from Cal Tech at 21. But my mother paid scant attention to his social-emotional development.

In reaction to my mother’s blind spot, my two children were given lots and lots of social experiences. I spoke with them continually about their feelings and sent them to schools where individual development was more important then competition.

Professionally, for more than 30 years I have worked as an educator and psychologist and author to help children and their parents work out the challenges and kinks in their normal development issues.

All this background is a way of establishing my passion about how important gifted kids are to me and to the future of our world.

Tutors for Gifted Kids has two purposes, which are very interconnected. First, we work with your child’s problems at school, which might include:
    • listening
    • sitting still
    • handwriting
    • doing homework
    • getting along with others

Second, we provide enrichment activities to help your child develop their passion and sense of self.

Parents are invited to attend a monthly parenting meeting so they can get to know how other children and moms and dads work through the unique and very special issues of gifted children.

I look forward to talking with you about your child.

Yes, I am finally on Facebook!

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100003685383041

So, I've read the new book by Barbara Klein and it's an absolute MUST-READ for anyone who wants to understand twins—or him/herself, if you are a twin. I have read some scientific approaches to twinship before, including Segal and Sandbank, but Klein presents the reader not only with twin-behavior but with the underlying psychological reasons.
 
Dr. Klein carefully balances nature vs. nurture speculation (that is, she takes the primary attachment between twins into consideration and also describes the way this attachment develops through early and later experiences in the twin's life but she avoids judging what behavior is due to one or the other traits, inborn or acquired). So, for me as an early-loss twin, it is possible throughout the book to identify with twin-behavior and still take the different experiences I necessarily had through growing up without my twin into consideration. I was surprised how much I resemble the twins described, not always in behavior, but in the underlying principles. Since it is common knowledge that a multiple pregnancy is very different from a singleton-pregnancy, I don't see why this shouldn't be true for the babies as much as for the mother. Twins develop in a different prenatal environment than singletons, they ARE different and they are born fully equipped for a different world than the one they'll encounter. This is doubly true for the single born twin whose brain was exposed to stimulations which were entirely normal for him/her and which suddenly no longer exist after birth. Tricky situation. Although growing up with your twin is very different from being a twin and growing up single, the ideas and tips on how to deal with having to cope in a non-twin world are extremely helpful even for an in-utero-loser. Before I knew I was a twin I considered myself just a freak—which is a bad thing. After I learned about my twin's miscarriage I considered myself a twinless twin, a wombtwin survivor, a traumatized victim of early twinloss—which is not a good thing in itself, either.
 
After reading Dr. Klein's book I have just started to consider myself a twin trying to cope in a non-twin world (with additional handicaps)—which is in itself not a bad thing at all. It makes a great difference to see my expectations toward closeness and communication either as over-demanding, freakish or pathological or as a pattern stemming from an in-utero experience. It greatly helps to understand myself and be more tolerant with others. Before I ordered the book I was reluctant because of the more than 20 Euro I had to pay, but it was worth every cent. :-)
 
Kya von Kemathenga

Dear Parents,

More often than ever before I am hearing about bullying at school. I have decided to offer a friendship group to teach children how to talk to friends and classmates who are being rude.

If you are interested please email me at drbarbaraklein@gmail.com or call (310) 443-4182.

"I got so much out of reading this book about twin identity, as a mother of twins and especially compared to another scholarly book I've read which was also written by a female twin - Raising Emotionally Healthy Twins by Dr. J. F. which was frankly quite off-putting.

Dr. Barbara Klein (whose practice is in Brentwood) is very generous with her personal experiences as a twin and also judiciously prudent in the way she selectively shares many of her case studies. The tone of this book is informative and grounded, and she manages to reach and entertain several different audiences (that of therapists of twins, twins themselves, and parents and other family members of twins).

Twins don't actually realize they are themselves until 4 months, or simply put "(infant) twins do not know whose foot belongs to whom". (My own fraternal twins consistently mis-identified themselves in photographs as their twin sister until they were about three and a half years old.) Dr. Klein says twins like to take care of others, are naturally very empathic, and have an increased capacity for closeness. She attributes their deep longing for intimacy to twins being "born married". She writes, "You can't get a new mother and you can't get a new twin".

I also learned a lot about the heart breaking subject of twin loss from this book; and cannot wait for my girls to get old enough to answer the list of questions Dr. Klein provides (How Therapists Can Better Understand the Problems Twins Have Relating to Others)."

 From Goodreads.com

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13549118-alone-in-the-mirror#other_reviews