A guidebook for parenting courageously and responsibly by allowing your kids to be who they are while building structures that keep them safe, Drop the Worry Ball is a must for all parents who wish to be and do their very best.

How do you avoid being a helicopter parent-and raise well adjusted, truly independent children? In an age of entitlement, where most kids think they deserve the best of everything, most parents are afraid of failing their children. Not only are they all too willing to provide every material comfort, they've also become overly involved in their children's lives, becoming meddlesome managers, rather than sympathetic advocates. In Drop the Worry Ball, authors Alex Russell and Tim Falconer offer a refreshing approach to raising well-adjusted children who are also independent and unafraid to make mistakes.

Alex Russell (Ph.D., C.Psych.) is a clinical psychologist who lives and works in Toronto.  He earned his Ph.D. from The New School for Social Research in New York and now provides assessments and psychotherapy to children and adults, and consultation and supervision to schools, teachers and psychologists. He is a popular speaker to parents' groups and educators, and has been an online mediator of a TVOntario website focused on parenting and child development. He is a research affiliate with the Hincks-Dellcrest Institute where his activities include the development of an early intervention family therapy program serving families with children at risk, articles on children's emotional development, and serving on the editorial board of Ideas: Emotional Well-Being in Child Care, a national journal of early childhood educators. A father of two teenagers, he is an active parent in his community and an avid hockey player and coach.

Alex Russell's profile page

TIM FALCONER is the author of Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music, which the Globe and Mail named to The Globe 100 Best Books of 2016. He’s also written books on activism, our love-hate relationship with the car, end-of-life ethics, and parenting. Falconer teaches creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College in Halifax, is a faculty editor in the literary journalism program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and taught magazine journalism at Toronto’s Ryerson University for two decades. A former writer-in-residence at Berton House in Dawson City, he returns to the Yukon as often as he can, but lives in Toronto.

Tim Falconer's profile page