Juster, Anna Housley. How to Train Your Amygdala. Illustrated by Cynthia Cliff. Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit Publishing, 2024.

Guide to categories: Kid Review – review of books for elementary-aged and younger children

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About the Book:

Your amygdala works hard to protect you from danger, but what about when it gets things wrong? This amusing character-driven narrative helps children learn to calm their amygdala and control their fight-flight-freeze impulses. 

The amygdala is the brain’s alarm system that alerts for danger, but sometimes it gets things wrong and needs help calming down. In this picture book, young readers receive kid-friendly information about the amygdala from the amygdala, how it can sometimes get confused, and simple ideas to calm and train it. 

The amygdala in How to Train Your Amygdala makes complicated concepts accessible to children so they can understand their bodies, practice impulse control, and boost their self-regulation. “You have probably never seen me before, but I am right here in your brain. There is an amygdala in everyone’s brain. It’s true! All humans have one. Many other animals do too.”

Throughout the book, the amygdala and the reader practice anxiety-calming and mindfulness strategies such as deep breathing, visualization, and progressive relaxation. With anxiety on the rise among children, learning how to calm the amygdala is a critical life skill.  

Additional content at the back of the book includes an amygdala’s training playbook for kids and more information for adults to help reinforce the book’s message.

Purchase How to Train Your Amygdala on Amazon – https://amzn.to/4eWWvnU

My Kid Review

I love this book! I have been spending some time recently considering nervous system dysregulation. The more I learn about the nervous system the more I discover that many of us need to learn to regulate our nervous system and the amygdala is a big part of that. 

How to Train Your Amygdala is written in words that even young children can understand. Author Anna Housley Juster has included a training manual for kids and a training guide for adults.

Cynthia Cliff crafted illustrations, including a cute amygdala figure to help children understand the concepts of the book. 

How to Train Your Amygdala could find uses in both classrooms and homes – anywhere a child needs help understanding their feelings. 

I recommend How to Train Your Amygdala for inclusion in a K-12 Christian school library. It is appropriate for all ages and could find a place in either a picture book section or the non fiction section of a library.

I received a complimentary copy  of How to Train Your Amygdala. This is my honest review. 

About the Author – Anna Housley Juster:

Anna Housley Juster, Ph.D., LICSW, is a child and adolescent mental health clinician and early childhood education consultant. She began her career as a Head Start teacher and has over two decades of experience supporting children and families across a variety of contexts including schools, museums, libraries, and clinical mental health settings. During several years in children’s media, she served as director of content for Sesame Street developing curriculum for the series, publishing, product development, and interactive technology. Anna is a firm believer in the power of play, her favorite number is 3, and she lives with her husband, two daughters, and one very soft dog near Boston, Massachusetts.

About the Illustrator – Cynthia Cliff

Cynthia Cliff is a self-taught artist and author who grew up in a tiny historic village in rural Virginia surrounded by her large superstitious family, and farms and woodlands where she spent every waking hour. This upbringing provided her with a deep love and appreciation for history, family, nature, and folklore—themes that find their way into much of her whimsical, folk-art inspired, and optimistic artwork. She resides in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., with her partner and four-legged family.

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