The Social-Emotional Guidebook: Motivate Children With Social Challenges To Master Social & Emotional Coping Skills

About the Book

Brimming with clinical wisdom gathered over two decades, this Guidebook unveils a framework for compassionate social and coping skill training for caregivers, educators, and therapists. The strategies you encounter here can benefit any child, but they were originally created to support children with ADHD, mild Autism, learning differences, and related self-regulation challenges. You’ll discover positive responses and language-scripts that celebrate successes and problem-solve social miscues and emotional overreactions. You’ll develop nuanced interventions that resolve each level of frustration and decrease unnecessary meltdowns and shutdowns. The objective is to become skilled at increasing motivation, cooperation, and collaboration while decreasing conflict, defiance, and refusal behaviors in your child. This Guidebook neatly integrates with and enhances any social skills or S.E.L. (Social Emotional Learning) curriculum. Discover how Mike Fogel’s culture of positivity puts you in the driver’s seat of the training process while your child blossoms with self-determination and self-responsibility.

As the director of the Art of Friendship Social-Coping Program since 2000, Mike revolutionized social and emotional coping skills training for children and adolescents using visual communication. Mike preaches that the most powerful social training program requires caregivers at home and school to take an active role in helping the child implement the skills. That’s weighty responsibility for caregivers and professionals, but unless you have training in behaviorism and social skill development, it’s hard to know how to do it. When do you push and when do you back off? What’s the difference between a social miscue and misbehavior? How do you help without destroying your child’s self-esteem or your relationship? This book answers those questions and more with compassion and optimism.

About the Author

Mike Fogel, MA, ATR-BC, LPC, is passionate about children, parenting, and playfulness in therapy. Inspired to create a better world, Mike, a licensed professional counselor and art therapist, innovated award-winning child therapy programs and businesses: The Art of Friendship Social-Coping Program® (2000), Child and Family Art Therapy Center (2007), Camp Pegasus (2013), and the BetterWorld Affordable Art Therapy Program (2019). In 2006, he received the “Innovative Application of Art Therapy Award” and opened The Child and Family Art Therapy Center (CFATC) the following year. CFATC provides the ideal environment for children and adolescents with a wide range of emotional-behavioral challenges to participate in his person-centered, or humanistic, therapy. Its comfortable, compassionate staff allow all participants to relax and trust they are in good hands. Mike’s work is supercharged by heartfelt faith that every person has the innate capacity to heal, grow, and progress toward their vast personal potential, and his parents and children “get that.” Since 1995, Mike cultivated a specialty in social skills group therapy with neuro-diverse children with High Functioning Autism, ADHD, and learning differences. The unique needs of this population stimulated Mike’s creation of a comprehensive program for teaching social and emotional coping-skills. As it turns out, most parents and professionals who learn Mike’s techniques and social-coping skills language say that everyone, adult and child, can benefit from these lessons! His year-round social skills group therapy work is enhanced by his intensive therapeutic social skills day camp, Camp Pegasus, in Philadelphia’s suburbs. The camp’s social skills curriculum originated from the clinical practice and research of the Art of Friendship Social-Coping Program, the Philadelphia region’s original social- and emotional-coping skills training program. Mike’s warm, joyful style engages even the most reluctant child, and his training style presents complex concepts in clear and memorable ways. Mike was an adjunct professor and clinical supervisor in Drexel University’s graduate art therapy program for years. You can find him at conferences and workshops around the country, where he is a popular presenter on creative and visual ways to help children and families overcome challenges and thrive. He has served in volunteer positions on the board of directors of the Asperger & Autism Alliance of Greater Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Art Therapy Association. Presently, Mike is thrilled to fulfill his dream of sharing his loving and creative lessons worldwide through publication and presentation. Mike lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with his wife, two children, and Penny the Shih-Tsu. He loves comic books, progressive rock music, all things comedic, college basketball, and his Philadelphia Eagles.