Charming Children” is a very interesting and informative book. Personally, I wish I had known and used these communication and relaxation techniques when my own children were growing up. Setting aside time each night to relax and communicate with your child at bedtime is such a simple task and can be full of great rewards for both you and your child. Just using specific language structure and imagery (the “relaxation game”) for 10 minutes each day will help relax child and influence their attitude behavior.

The author, Dr. Ginny Lucas, offers a concise and enjoyable approach to interaction that strengthens the bond between you and your child and prepares boy of you for a mor restful sleep. Happier days, and healthier relationships. The results are priceless.

I am a grandparent now and cannot wait for my grandson to spend the night again just to try this “game” at bet time. As a child care provider I am also eager to adapt it for use at quiet time to promote y children’s self-confidence and to improve their self-esteem.

Every care provider can benefit from reading this book, as well as parents) even before starting their family). Charming Children is truly an inspiration to anyone involved with children. I highly recommend it and will be giving our a few copies for Christmas presents (if I can wait than long).

Dr Lucas is a credentialed psychologist. She has three adult children, nine grandchildren and four great grandchildren. Over the past three years she has been rated top present er at state and national level professional childcare conferences.

Review submitted by Debbie Strack

Ginny Lucas is a wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother. Professionally, she is a credentialed psychologist who specializes in clinical hypnosis, having earned doctorate degrees in both hypnotherapy (DCH) and psychology (PhD).

She is founder and director of Evergreen Professional Hypnotherapy in Stockton CA (since 1992) and in 2003 was named Stockton’s Small Business Person of the Year.

Seven years old and still sleeping with his parents. Every night. In the H position. Imagining the letter H, its upright lines would be Mom and Dad, with Elliott in the middle, sleeping crossways. He felt cozy and indulged. His mom felt nurturing and protective. His entertainer dad felt grumpy and frustrated. The only place James was able to enjoy a decent night’s sleep was when he traveled alone to Reno or Las Vegas to perform as a Mentalist – a professional observer and creative manipulator of thoughts and behavior. When his wife finally agreed sleeping arrangements needed improvement, she insisted it be handled delicately. She asked James, “Why don’t you hypnotize him?”

Stage hypnosis is a small piece of James’s act, requiring a limited understanding of hypnotherapy as Freud was first to call clinical hypnosis — which ideally draws from a deeper well to treat psychological complexities inherent to human behavior. With only the basics available to him, James decided to sit beside Elliott after tucking him into his own bed, and to use the skills of his profession to convince his son that sleeping alone would feel comfortable, safe, and more importantly, seem an extension of his parents’ love for him, rather than rejection.

The desired results were immediate and long lasting. A bedtime ritual was born – ten minutes of meaningful monologue nightly, designed to enhance Elliott’s self-confidence and self-esteem at home, at school, and in sports. Not only did every area of his life improve remarkably, but the bonding between father and son deepened, his relationship with his older sister improved, and Elliott internalized and reflected family values that took precedence over less desirable influences coming at him from other sources such as TV, video games, movies, music, and other children.

Many mothers and fathers simply recycle the parenting skills they learned as they were being raised during their own childhood. This might include such communication techniques as asking, repeating, instructing, insisting, demonstrating, commanding, pleading, nagging, reasoning and even berating

– all of which may seem to work on the surface while at a deeper level doing psychological damage or simply falling flat, begging the question, “What do I do now?”

The answer rests in understanding how the nature of a child’s mind differs from the nature of an adult’s mind. Most people are aware of the hemispheres of the brain – left, which is associated with logical processing, and right, which is associated with imagination and creativity. For the purpose of this discussion, an understanding of the mind is requisite.

The conscious part of the mind correlates with right brain. It is the home of our intellect. The subconscious mind correlates with left brain. It is the home of our imagination. Another way of looking at it is to think of the conscious mind as the workplace, whereas the subconscious is the playground of the mind. Now where would you speculate that children spend most of their time? That’s right… the playground! In fact children live in a subconscious state. They are highly imaginative, and the intellect has not yet developed.

The subconscious is also in charge of long-term memory. It actually remembers everything; however, we’re not consciously aware of what is stored there, because the information is stored below the level of consciousness (sub-conscious). Additionally, the subconscious is where we do our emotional as opposed to rational processing. This means that children are driven by feelings, based on the stimuli that exist in their environment. Ask a child, “Why did you bite your sister?” and the answer will most likely be something along the lines of, “I don’t know [rational]. I just felt like it” (emotional].

The subconscious has a powerful influence on all of us, and most particularly on children. They are constantly absorbing (without questioning) information that comes at them from many directions, and storing it subconsciously. They then act out what they

have taken in. They have no choice in the matter. Their response is automatic. In terms of the brain, the part that is in charge of judgment (“I’ll accept this but reject that”) does not develop until the late teens or early twenties, and by then personality and basic attitude have long been determined, habits have been established, and behavior moves in a preordained direction (short of intervention).

In order for parents and other care providers to ensure that their influence over their children overrides the influence of others (which may conflict with desired life values), adults need not know all that the professionals know and use therapeutically, but they must understand the basics of communicating on a subconscious level, which James used with Elliott to dramatically improve his life. Here are three:

Always use a positive language structure.

The subconscious mind cannot process a negative. It turns every negative into a positive. “Don’t spill the milk” becomes, “Spill the milk.” “Don’t forget your jacket,” becomes, “Forget your jacket,” and so on. The subconscious mind creates pictures (of spilling the milk, forgetting the jacket). A picture is worth how many words? Yes… a thousand! There’s no 100% guarantee that a statement framed negatively will have an undesired affect on a child, but it does increase the odds of behavior completely opposite of what has been aimed for. This is not a choice made by a child, it is an automatic response.

The subconscious mind recognizes every question as a statement.

a) “Why do you always talk back to me?” becomes, “You always talk back to me.” “Why do you insist on leaving toys everywhere?” becomes, “You always leave toys everywhere.”

b) A child cannot tell you why. Children don’t understand it themselves, because the intellectual part of their mind has not yet developed.

Always appeal to a child’s imagination and/or feelings.

This is like speaking Italian to someone who only speaks Italian. A child will “get” what it is you’re trying to say (if you are using proper lan-

guage structure as well), and this understanding will occur in such a way as to have long term influence on his or her attitude and behavior.

Malia is a law student and single mother. Her son’s pre-pre-schoolteacher told her the 3-year-old was behaving badly. At home Malia was sending him to bed every night with one or both of them in tears, only to awaken every morning feeling more frustrated. When she learned and applied the same techniques James used with Elliott, she described the results as immediate and dramatic. “Now in the mornings he comes bouncing into my room, jumps up into my arms with a huge smile, kisses me all over my face, and says, ‘Hi morning, Mommy!’ Both our lives have been turned around!”

Esther’s daughter-in-law tried for three months to potty train her 2-year-old daughter. Not only was it unsuccessful, but it turned “increasingly ugly,” as she put it. Esther learned the basics of subconscious influence, asked if her granddaughter could stay with her for a week, and in that period of time she had the child completely toilet trained. She returned a happy little girl to her mommy, who was amazed.

Did Malia and Esther use hypnosis to create improvement? Only if you accept the definition of hypnosis used by Dr. Milton Erickson, a world-famous psychiatrist often quoted as saying, “All effective communication is hypnosis.” By this he meant that when you influence the way a person feels — about himself or herself, about you, about others, about a specific attitude or behavior, or about life itself — you can bring about significant and lasting change.

Hypnosis isn’t about some deep, mysterious trance during which one person takes control of another person’s mind. It is a method by which information is processed naturally on a subconscious level. Stage hypnotists have spread countless common misconceptions, and clinical practitioners with inadequate training and/or poor work ethics have given it a bad rap. Simply stated, hypnosis is a combination of relaxation, concentration, imagination, and suggestion. It is a safe and normal frame of mind for all of us, (which is why the same basic techniques can be put to use with an older child, a spouse, in the workplace, and so on); and it is the place where children live. To create a psychologically sound environment for healthy, happy children, learn and use effective communication. Understand their world. Visit their state… of mind.