There's no denying the clear connection between overuse of devices--smartphones, computers, and video games--and the growing mental health crisis, especially in our children. Too much screen time has a real, measurable effect on kids' brains, self-esteem, emotional development, and social skills. We aren't controlling our devices anymore--they're controlling us. In Disconnected, psychotherapist and parenting expert Thomas Kersting offers a comprehensive look at how devices have altered the way our children grow up, behave, learn, and connect with their families and friends. Based on the latest studies on the connection between screen time and neuroplasticity, as well as the growing research on acquired ADHD and anxiety, Disconnected presents a better way to move forward. Kersting shares indispensable advice for parents on setting boundaries and engaging in concentration and mindfulness exercises. If you want to reclaim your family and reconnect with your kids, this hard-hitting yet hopeful book is the place to start.

Kersting explores the device-dependent world our children live in and its effects on their mental and emotional well-being. Research shows that too much time in the cyber world is re-wiring kid's brains, affecting their ability to flourish in the real world as anxiety, depression, and attention issues soar. Strategies to help reduce screen-time as well as meditative and mindfulness techniques may help our children reclaim their brains, and their lives, are provided.

One approach to organic synthesis is retrosynthetic analysis. With this approach chemists start with the structures of their target molecules and progressively cut bonds to create simpler molecules. Reversing this process gives a synthetic route to the target molecule from simpler starting materials. This “disconnection” approach to synthesis is now a fundamental part of every organic synthesis course. Workbook for Organic Synthesis: The Disconnection Approach, 2nd Edition This workbook provides a comprehensive graded set of problems to illustrate and develop the themes of each of the chapters in the textbook Organic Synthesis: The Disconnection Approach, 2nd Edition. Each problem is followed by a fully explained solution and discussion. The examples extend the student’s experience of the types of molecules being synthesised by organic chemists, and the strategies they employ to control their syntheses. By working through these examples students will develop their skills in analysing synthetic challenges, and build a toolkit of strategies for planning new syntheses. Examples are drawn from pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, natural products, pheromones, perfumery and flavouring compounds, dyestuffs, monomers, and intermediates used in more advanced synthetic work. Reasons for wishing to synthesise each compound are given. Together the workbook and textbook provide a complete course in retrosynthetic analysis. Organic Synthesis: The Disconnection Approach, 2nd Edition There are forty chapters in Organic Synthesis: The Disconnection Approach, 2nd Edition: those on the synthesis of given types of molecules alternate with strategy chapters in which the methods just learnt are placed in a wider context. The synthesis chapters cover many ways of making each type of molecule starting with simple aromatic and aliphatic compounds with one functional group and progressing to molecules with many functional groups. The strategy chapters cover questions of selectivity, protection, stereochemistry, and develop more advanced thinking via reagents specifically designed for difficult problems. In its second edition updated examples and techniques are included and illustrated additional material has been added to take the student to the level required by the sequel, Organic Synthesis: Strategy and Control. Several chapters contain extensive new material based on courses that the authors give to chemists in the pharmaceutical industry. Workbook for Organic Synthesis: The Disconnection Approach, 2nd edition, combined with the main textbook, provides a full course in retrosynthetic analysis for chemistry and biochemistry students, and a refresher course for organic chemists working in industry and academia.

The Disconnected Man tracks the journey of one man's surprise discovery of his own disconnectedness and his desire to help other men, and the women who love them, before it is too late. Disconnected men hide out in plain view: in our churches, in our families and in our communities. They are competent, capable men who quietly 'do their duty' and attract little attention. They are fairly happy guys, relatively unemotional and capable of carrying heavy loads of responsibility, but are very difficult to get to know beyond superficial friendship. A closer examination inside their marriages reveals a desert strewn with emotionally emaciated spouses. While their competence may build the church, organize a group, or run a company, they haven't the slightest notion how to connect intimately with those they love. Their wives suffer, usually in silence, while the church and culture press past this couple secretly falling apart. Jim Turner was that disconnected man going about his life, happily fulfilling his duty within his own self-protective bubble, until God suddenly burst it in a most horrific way. His story starts when that devastation left him clinging precariously to the remaining shreds of his broken marriage. Jim longs to share with other disconnected men what he learned through that ordeal, to help them understand their disobedience and show how they can achieve real connection with those they love.

How young people think about the moral and ethical dilemmas they encounter when they share and use online content and participate in online communities. Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game routinely cheat new players by selling them worthless virtual accessories for high prices. In Disconnected, Carrie James examines how young people and the adults in their lives think about these sorts of online dilemmas, describing ethical blind spots and disconnects. Drawing on extensive interviews with young people between the ages of 10 and 25, James describes the nature of their thinking about privacy, property, and participation online. She identifies three ways that young people approach online activities. A teen might practice self-focused thinking, concerned mostly about consequences for herself; moral thinking, concerned about the consequences for people he knows; or ethical thinking, concerned about unknown individuals and larger communities. James finds, among other things, that youth are often blind to moral or ethical concerns about privacy; that attitudes toward property range from “what's theirs is theirs” to “free for all”; that hostile speech can be met with a belief that online content is “just a joke”; and that adults who are consulted about such dilemmas often emphasize personal safety issues over online ethics and citizenship. Considering ways to address the digital ethics gap, James offers a vision of conscientious connectivity, which involves ethical thinking skills but, perhaps more important, is marked by sensitivity to the dilemmas posed by online life, a motivation to wrestle with them, and a sense of moral agency that supports socially positive online actions.

In many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two people involved. But anyone who has gone through a divorce knows the additional public dimensions of breaking up, from intense shame and societal criticism to friends’ and relatives’ unsolicited advice. In Intimate Disconnections, Allison Alexy tells the fascinating story of the changing norms surrounding divorce in Japan in the early 2000s, when sudden demographic and social changes made it a newly visible and viable option. Not only will one of three Japanese marriages today end in divorce, but divorces are suddenly much more likely to be initiated by women who cite new standards for intimacy as their motivation. As people across Japan now consider divorcing their spouses, or work to avoid separation, they face complicated questions about the risks and possibilities marriage brings: How can couples be intimate without becoming suffocatingly close? How should they build loving relationships when older models are no longer feasible? What do you do, both legally and socially, when you just can’t take it anymore? Relating the intensely personal stories from people experiencing different stages of divorce, Alexy provides a rich ethnography of Japan while also speaking more broadly to contemporary visions of love and marriage during an era in which neoliberal values are prompting wide-ranging transformations in homes across the globe.

This book is filled with practical, proven strategies, effective tools, and inspiring stories designed to help adults shape and improve connections with kids.