Endorsements

Your work and your book are very rich,

Teaching children to live in the moment,

To see their beliefs and expectations for what they are,

A magic show of smoke and mirrors.

Like the children we are caught by them,

Making us live in delusional dreams.

But we wake up from them,

Here and there,

Thanks to people like you!

William Menza (Poet)

In their recently published book, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy For Anxious Children, Drs. Randye Semple and Jennifer Lee discuss a model of therapy that helps children learn to observe the feelings and the bodily sensations that go along with anxiety. This helps anxious children to understand that they can decide whether or not to react emotionally to these feelings and sensations, which in turn allows them to manage the symptoms of anxiety. While the book is intended for therapists, parents and educators may also find it beneficial in working with anxious children.

Dr. Leslie Evelo (onlinetherapyconsult.com)

Semple and Lee do a very good job integrating CBT with mindfulness-based approaches. Where similarities exist they are pointed out and where differences exist they are made known. Primarily aimed at practitioners, this book could also be a valuable adjunctive textbook in any graduate level psychology, psychiatry, or social work program where child- and family-focused psychotherapy are part of the curriculum. This does represent a new and exciting addition to those treatment paradigms focusing on childhood anxiety that have already received empirical support.

Howard A. Paul, PhD, ABPP, FAACP (Journal of Child and Family Behavior Therapy)

Informed by the authors’ years of personal experience and rigorous methodological development, this book provides a treatment manual that is both clinically accessible and supported by empirical clinical trials. . . . Semple and Lee’s MBCT-C manual is one of the most detailed, thorough, and eloquently written manuals in the mindfulness intervention armamentarium.

Joshua C. Felver, MS (Journal of Mindfulness)

Drs. Semple and Lee have written an excellent guide and manual for teaching mindfulness skills to anxious children. Their adaptation of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for use with kids is both technically compelling and wise. Along with Susan Kaiser Greenland, Semple and Lee are pioneers in this area, and this book shows it.

John Briere, PhD (Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, University of Southern California)

I am part of a research team at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital conducting studies on Drs. Semple and Lee’s protocol, and we can definitely support the previous research that MBCT-C is helpful for kids with anxiety and other problems. Amazingly, we have already seen significant brain changes in how kids relate to their emotions using fMRI brain scans before and after the 12-week protocol. The book provides clear instructions for how to conduct each session, along with a CD of electronic files to print all the client handouts. While the authors mention some Buddhist concepts to illustrate points for the therapists reading the book (and I for one am a big fan of Alan Watts), the sessions themselves are conducted as purely clinical / psychoeducational. This is a groundbreaking book, and I highly recommend it!

Richard Sears, PsyD, ABPP (Author of Mindfulness in Clinical Practice, Building Competence in MBCT, and Mindfulness: Living through Challenges and Enriching your Life in this Moment)

Drawn by a 12-year-old boy who participated in an MBCT-C group