REVIEW: The Sensitive Ones: Healing and Understanding Your Child's Mental Health by Heather Nardi (2-stars)

I really enjoyed reading this book about the author's journey to find a path forward with her daughter's very young diagnosis of mental health issues at the age of 8 years old.  

The key recommendations are sound:  listen to your intuition, listen to your child, listen to your family, learn to be resilient and find comfort, strength and courage in modalities that feel right to you (within reason).

The book repeated a lot of information and I felt as though the author perpetuated some negative stereotypes or information even as she extolled the value of her own personal spiritual journey.  While she relates the story of a shift in her daughter at age 14 after being sent off to an in-patient clinical setting as having blossomed and grown into a highly sensitive empath, she still continues to refer to her daughter as having mental health issues.  

I felt like the author should choose -- is this a person with a mental health issue -- or is this a misunderstood sensitive empath? Sure, it can be both - but it seems to me that if she's quit all her medications, quit therapy and is using crystals and flower essences and coping mechanisms for resilience, maybe she isn't and never was suffering a mental health issue?

The author relates a story about how a social worker sent to her home interviewed her and said "I think that it's your parenting that is causing these issues."  The author was destroyed by this assessment - but then goes on to describe how her husband's more structured parenting style and her own laissez-faire style created confusion for her daughter and resulted in some of the behavior that was observed.  So, maybe, yes -- this was the result of contradictory parenting styles.  It's better to find out sooner than later -- and, I should imagine, if she's so self-aware and open minded that she's willing to seek out a medium and the advice of angels or ghosts, she might also be willing to examine how her own behavior and choices had an impact on her daughter. 

REVIEW: The Sensitive Ones: Healing and Understanding Your Child's Mental Health by Heather Nardi

RATING: 2-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

"Barbarian Coffee Cake"

 

This recipe is based on my grandmother's Barvarian Coffee Cake recipe which had a LOT more sugar, fat and refined flour.  I've veganized it and made it a vehicle for lots of fruit!

I doubled this recipe so that I could do apricot & plum - and put them in the same pan.  I also added some pitted cherries because - why not? You can use any fruit -- you can put applesauce in the batter and put a (strained) can of pineapple or canned cherries on top. 

Bowl 1 - Sift together

• 1 c whole wheat flour or whole wheat pastry flour
• 3/4 c almond flour 
• 1/2 c white flour (optional if you are using whole wheat pastry flour0
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• pinch of salt

Bowl 2 - wet

• 1/2 c sugar (I used turbinado but sucanat would be good, too - I like the molasses flavor)
• 
  ~1 c fruit purée
• 1/2 c melted coconut oil or neutral oil / vegan butter
• 1 Tb almond extract
• 1 tsp vanillazest and juice of 1/2 lemon
• water or plant based milk as needed

Thoroughly blend each bowl then add wet to dry.

Plum was processed through the Vittorio food mill which results in a much messier process in the kitchen but plum skins don’t shred very well in the blender in my experience.

I processed the apricots in the blender to make the purée.

The batter should be really thick but not so stiff that you can’t mix it so add liquid to loosen it up.

As you can see I did apricot and plum. 

I used 2 part tart pans, so I don’t want the batter to be so thin that it’s going to leak out the bottom.

Bake at 350 for 30-40 min - wooden toothpick inserted near the center should come out clean. Glaze with melted jelly - In this case I used leftover apricot syrup from the process of making glacee apricots.

Be careful to not overfill your cake pan -- once the baking powder/soda start working, you may have a bit of spillover.  Put a cookie sheet below your cake if you are concerned about overflow.