About The Nurtured Heart Approach™                                

By Howard Glasser                                                                    

It's always been a little surreal for me to receive credit for The Nurtured Heart Approach™ and for all the impact it has had on so many lives. If anything, I feel I was the lucky one who was merely in the right place at the right time and the right person with the right qualifications.

One such qualification was having been a difficult child; another was having had the experience of NOT getting to use my intensity well for so many years; another was having experienced the devastating sense of lost time, lost effort and lost dreams.

It was these very experiences that produced within me a passion to make the successful use of this approach so attainable that it allows parents and teachers to renew their love for their children and deeply experience having a positive impact -- right from the start of putting this approach into action.

As my therapy practice began to shift from adults to families, especially families with difficult children, I became convinced that while normal parenting techniques might work to some extent with easy-to-raise children, they usually backfired with intense children.

I started seeing parent-child relationships in terms of the exchange of energy. Those observations and the insights I gained from them led me to begin experimenting with tools and techniques that ultimately became known as the Nurtured Heart Approach™.

Watching parents have phenomenal, transformational results with the approach, I started presenting family workshops and teaching it to other therapists, again, with just sensational results and feedback. Many parents and therapists would ask me, "When is your book coming out?" Finally, in 1999, with the help of coauthor Jennifer Easley, we published, "Transforming the Difficult Child: The Nurtured Heart Approach™." It has been a best-seller for helping intense children ever since. 

My passion was always to help families struggling to raise a high-intensity child, and the book was a guide for them to implement the approach at home. I was also fortunate enough to be able to test the approach in schools, starting in a school with a lot stacked against it in terms of helping students be successful, but again the approach gave the school incredibly successful results. Since then, the Nurtured Heart Approach™ has been used in so many different settings -- foster homes, group homes, children in the juvenile justice system. Along the way, it became undeniably evident that the approach, while designed for high-intensity children, works wonders with all children, enabling them to flourish beyond expectations, which I write about in "All Children Flourishing."

So that's the birth and history of The Nurtured Heart Approach™ -- although it's certainly nowhere close to the end of the story!

To your greatness and the greatness of all,

Howard Glasser