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booksaremagic's review
5.0
This is an engaging workbook (at least for some, including my youngest son) that teaches lots of cognitive behavioral skills to help kids who have bedtime fears. The overarching theme is "magic tricks," although the book does specify that the skills being learned are skills and not magic after all. Most chapters start with a "real" magic trick to learn that relates to the topic of the chapter. Written for approximately ages 6-11, I found it worked pretty well for our 5-year-old. I would not recommend it for anyone younger than five just because the skills and some of the concepts are beyond the capacity of preschoolers or younger. The magic tricks were pretty difficult for our 5-year-old, but he probably could have mastered most of them with more practice. They are not an essential part of the book. Many parents who reviewed this book on Amazon said they had their children skip them. Speaking of which, not all of these skills will work equally for every person. Some may need to be skipped while others are emphasized. Our son was not advanced enough in terms of how fearful he was to work on some of the skills before we had finished the book. And another seemingly silly tactic worked really well: drawing a remote control on paper with a few basic buttons on it to "change the channel on his brain TV," "stop worry thoughts," and "pause with relaxation breaths" that was laminated and kept in his hand when it was time to try to go to sleep.
I am so grateful to Dawn Huebner for creating this fun workbook that helped my son take back a little bit of control over his thoughts. Even though we didn't use everything as written, it started us down the right path and kept my son interested and excited. For that, I give it five stars. I would just add a minor caveat that my older son who is workbook-phobic doesn't seem to get value out of these workbooks by Huebner. Looking at a book full of pages to do and read just makes him extra worried. But for our younger son who wants to make sense of things while creating, drawing, and going through a routine, this was gold.
I am so grateful to Dawn Huebner for creating this fun workbook that helped my son take back a little bit of control over his thoughts. Even though we didn't use everything as written, it started us down the right path and kept my son interested and excited. For that, I give it five stars. I would just add a minor caveat that my older son who is workbook-phobic doesn't seem to get value out of these workbooks by Huebner. Looking at a book full of pages to do and read just makes him extra worried. But for our younger son who wants to make sense of things while creating, drawing, and going through a routine, this was gold.
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