SASO

Recommended Reading

The following books are suggestions.  Come visit SASO's library to check out more titles.  For purchasing information, visit IndieBound.

Protecting the Gift – Gavin de Becker
Provides a direct look at strategies of predators, a study of how children are victimized, and a look at why.  Understanding human violence empowers parents to protect their children more effectively.

The Courage to Heal – Ellen Bass & Laura Davis
A comprehensive guide intended to offer women hope and encouragement as they move from victim to survivor.  (The Courage to Heal Workbook is available separately.)

Too Scared to Cry – Lenore Terr
This book, based on case studies of more than 285 young people, looks at the effect of trauma on children as well as our entire society.

The Bully, The Bullied, and The Bystander – Barbara Coloroso
From pre-school to high school – how parents and teachers can help break the cycle of violence.

Raising a Thinking Child – Myrna Sure
This book can teach young children how to solve problems and resolve conflicts that come up daily with friends, teachers, and family.  It can also help them explore alternative solutions and consequences, while considering the feelings of others.  (Raising a Thinking Child Workbook includes activities, games and discussions to help young children learn to socialize and deal with conflict resolution.)

Children First – Penelope Leach
This research places parenting in a social context with discussion of how our laws, employment policies and our culture can be harmful to children and disastrous to committed parents because of the ways they contradict our verbiage about family values.

Strong at the Broken Places – Linda Sanford
A book about the love, inner strength and courage of abuse survivors.  It challenges a common myth that “damaged goods” can’t heal from abuse.  Evidence from case studies reveals the moving proof that full recovery is not only possible, but in most cases, the norm.

For Your Own Good – Alice Miller
This book examines the roots of violence in our society by emphasizing the methods parents have used for centuries in raising their children and makes a correlation to the world conditions today that may be the result of the often harmful and cruel principals we accept in child rearing. 

Boys Will Be Boys – Myriam Miedzian
This book explores how and why American males are increasingly turning to violence and what we, as individuals and a society can do about it.  This book offers suggestions for teaching boys to be self-reliant, inquisitive and sensitive despite environmental pressure to be “macho” and domineering.