Thomas Armstrong
AUTHOR

Thomas Armstrong

Mental Health Children's Health Thought-Provoking
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I'm really excited about publishing my first novel (my 20th book overall), which came out in September 2022. It's called Childless, and it's about a childless child psychologist who tries to foil a U.S. government plot to declare childhood as a medical disorder (government scientists say childhood is too messy, emotional, and unfocused compared with the sensible and rational world of adulthood) and then eliminate it from the human genome using a human endogenous retrovirus. It's a really crazy, goofy book that I had a really fun time writing over the past twenty years while I've been writing my other books on learning and human development. It's a dystopian satire, dark comedy that stems from my belief that the institution of childhood is dying out in America with children being sexualized in the media, preschool kids being given standardized tests, kids no longer playing like they used to, adults violating child labor laws by having kids work at dangerous adult occupations, children gone missing, or being exploited, assaulted, abused, homeless, food insecure, in poverty, and/or growing up in psychologically dysfunctional environments. What happened to the real child? That's what I'd like to know! The curiosity, creativity, imagination, wonder, and playfulness of children that should be at the core of our parenting and education is dying off (I take up this issue in a recent book If Einstein Ran the Schools). My novel Childless plays that out in an exaggerated fashion but sometimes you have to take things to the limit in order to make a point! Anyway, when I'm not writing, I'm watching movies on The Criterion Channel, which is an incredible site for movie buffs, reading great literature (like the 2500-page Chinese novel The Story of the Stone), and listening to great music (my Echo Dot has become as essential to me as Grape Nuts and whole wheat bread in the morning!). I'm neurodivergent and have written two books on it - The Power of Neurodiversity, and Neurodiversity in the Classroom. I have a mood disorder (unipolar depression), which I manage via several medications, mindfulness meditation, regular exercise, a Mediterranean diet, yoga, psychotherapy, and whatever else i can throw at it (I've been in remission for the past fourteen years and I want to keep it that way!). I've traveled a lot as part of my speaking and writing, visiting thirty countries including Peru (where my breath was taken away by Machu Picchu), Vietnam, Iceland, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. Now with the pandemic, I don't do so much of that, which is fine because I'm basically an introvert and have a great time in my pink Victorian house on a hill in Sonoma County with my little dog Daisy (my wife left me after thirty years in 2016) just reading, socializing, exercising, and relaxing. I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota (hey, no wood chipper jokes please!). My house was destroyed in 1957 by an F-5 tornado (the worst kind). I went to public schools in Fargo, then to Carleton College in Minnesota for a couple of years, dropped out in the countercultural years of 1970-71, did some antiwar activities in Washington, D.C., then went back to school at the University of Massachusetts School of Education, got a Masters degree in Special Education at Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, went up to Montreal for two years to teach at the junior high level, then went to California in 1978 to teach elementary school level kids, and have been here in the Golden State ever since. I hated teaching in the public schools and managed to sublimate my rage at the inane teaching practices going on by writing books on educational reform, including In Their Own Way, which gave me some national attention, and after that other books, including The Myth of the ADD Child, and several books for an educational group called ASCD that has sold 450,000 copies of my eight books for them. I got my Ph.D. in San Francisco at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in East-West Psychology in 1987 (when I was 19 I went through a major depression/spiritual transformation and have been interested in Eastern mysticism ever since). I've written two books that focus on this east-west perspective: The Radiant Child, and The Human Odyssey: Navigating the Twelve Stages of Life. My plans for the future are to keep on writing as long as I am able to put words together. After some moderate success as a published author of 19 books over the past thirty-six years (1.4 million copies in print plus translations in 30 languages), I'm moving into a new phase of writing where I think I'll be self-publishing from now on. The publishing world has changed a lot in the past few years, not for the better, and there are too many gatekeepers (agents, editors, publishers) who are too concerned with authors grabbing their readers attention from the first paragraph so that it's assured of selling. I've got about 27 different book projects in mind, including another book on the stages of life, a second novel about a Buddhist in the 9th century who gets kicked out of his sangha in Central Asia and is picked up by Vikings in the Caspian Sea and taken to Iceland, a self-help book for people like me who have mood disorders, and a history book on the Indian mystic Meher Baba and his visit to Hollywood back in the 1930's. Like many of you, I'm holding tight as the nation and the world go through some uncertain times, but I'm basically an optimist and like to take the long view on things. Like John Lennon said ''and we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun, yes, we all shine all, everyone!''
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