Overcoming Anxiety in Children and Teens
By Dr. Jed Baker (2015)

To order from the Future Horizons website, click on the book image.

The key to this book is that it outlines both the science and art of anxiety therapy. The science of overcoming anxiety is using the well researched approach called gradual exposure therapy which involves helping individuals gradually face their fears. The art of therapy is figuring out how to actually convince someone to face their fears. Jed describes motivational techniques, cognitive behavioral strategies, exercises, relaxation and mindfulness guides to lower anxiety to the point where individuals can begin to confront their fears . The book covers: simple phobias, social phobia, selective mutism, separation anxiety and school refusal, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, somatic symptom disorder and/or illness anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, perfectionism, and other common fears.

 

No More Meltdowns - Positive Strategies for Managing and Preventing Out-Of-Control Behavior
By Dr. Jed Baker

To order from the Future Horizons website, click on the book image.

It could happen at the grocery store. At a restaurant. At school. At home. Meltdowns are stressful for both child and adult, but Dr. Baker can help! Author of the award-winning Social Skills Picture Book series, Dr. Jed Baker offers parents and teachers strategies for preventing and managing meltdowns. His 20+ years of experience working with children on the autism spectrum, combined with his personal experiences raising his own children, have yielded time-tested strategies, and results!

Dr. Baker offers an easy-to-follow, 4-step model that will improve your everyday relationships with the children in your life:

1) Managing your own emotions by adjusting your expectations,
2) Learning strategies to calm a meltdown in the moment,
3) Understanding why a meltdown occurs, and
4) Creating plans to prevent future meltdowns.

No More Meltdowns is now an App!
A Companion website and mobile app to the book No More Meltdowns, by Jed Baker, PhD

Positive strategies for managing and preventing out-of-control behavior: It could happen at the grocery store. At a restaurant. At school. At home. Meltdowns are stressful for both child and adult. This website and mobile app can help!

Record behavior while it happens: Use a PC to enter behaviors and triggers online, or use an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or touch-based smartphone.

Social Skills Picture Book by Dr. Jed Baker

To order from the Future Horizons website, click on the book image.

Order the book alone or along with the Accompanying CD!
(CD is meant to be used along with the book as a teaching tool. It contains all the photos from the book but no text. The CD can also be purchased alone if you already own this book, you can find it in the DVD and CD category.)

Just 15 years ago, Dr. Jed Baker discovered a child with Asperger’s syndrome among the New Jersey public school students who was participating in the University of Medicine and Dentistry School-based Programs.

Asperger’s syndrome is a complex disorder, often defined as a high-functioning form of autism. It is characterized by a lack of social common sense, things like how to play or make friends or pick up social cues. As a result, an Asperger’s child usually has difficulty in interacting with others. “Many children just don’t pick up intuitively on how to make friends,” he explained. “Some want to, but we need to teach those kids how.”

Baker concluded the Asperger’s student he had found needed a group with whom to learn interaction and social skills, “but, when we looked for something, we discovered there was nothing at that time.”

Not to be deterred by the total lack of such a group’s existence, Baker began a single group. The group evolved and subsequently expanded into multiple groups. He organized those into the Social Skills Training Project, a family therapy and consultative services practice for families of students with social-communication difficulties.

“It never occurred to me there was such a huge need,” he muses. Although no one knows the reasons why, autism has grown by gargantuan proportions in the last decade. In the United States alone, autism grew by 172 % compared to a 16% growth rate in all disabilities in the same period (and a 13% growth rate in the U.S. population). In some school districts, such as California’s, the autistic growth has been 273% (data gathered by the Autism Society of America).

During the same period, Baker began work in an autism program at Northern Valley Regional High School District and developed The Social Skills Picture Book. It is based on the premise that “seeing is learning.”

The Social Skills Picture Book immediately zoomed to the top of the chart in books on autism and Asperger’s because it provides a teaching tool that “engages the attention and motivation of students who need help learning appropriate social skills,”.

It demonstrates through pictures nearly 30 social skills, such as conversation, play, emotion management and empathy. “Children of all ages learn more effectively when pictures are used to supplement verbal descriptions and instructions,” Baker contends. “It’s particularly effective, or most helpful, when people build their own picture books, because they can see themselves in the book.”

The book is not only valuable for autistic children. “We’ve discovered that what is helpful for kids with autism is also helpful for most kids,” explains Baker. “That’s because breaking down skills into basic components is a good way for all to learn social skills.” For example, there’s a picture in the book of two children at a lunchroom table, where one of them is eating. The book tells the child that, to be sociable, he first could ask a question about what the other student is doing. “What are you eating?” asks one. “A bagel,” answers the other.

Then, the book tells the child it is beneficial (socially) to ask follow-up questions about the activity, like “How does it taste?” “Almost anyone can benefit from these basics,” explains Baker. “If a child is not initiating play, talking to or looking at his peers, he may need parental and/or professional intervention, the earlier the better.”

Most children need and usually want social skills to make friends, and, often, their level of happiness and productivity is dependant on these fundamentals. The Social Skills Picture Book attempts to teach these critical social skills by visually showing children what to do.