Dr. Wanda Draper, in Your Child Is Smarter Than You Think!, bridges the gap between how children learn and think and how they feel and behave. She discusses a whole-child approach to articulate the child's development and its relationship to learning and behavior from infancy through adolescence. This gives the reader a view of transitions from one stage to the next and how adults can enjoy and enhance each child's unfolding maturation of body, mind, and behavior. The author shows us just how intelligent and intuitive children really are in relation to their respective developmental levels. Instead of trying to control behavior by either promoting or prohibiting the child's responses and actions, she shows how to interpret both the child's and the adult's actions and their responses to one another. Dr. Draper's writing is based on decades of observing and working directly with children and adults from all manner of lifestyles, circumstances, and physical and mental abilities. She often says, "You can't send the head to school and leave the body at home-the whole child goes to school, the whole child lives at home, and the whole child participates in the world."
Wanda Draper, PhD, is an internationally recognized consultant, teacher, and author and a professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the College of Medicine, University of Oklahoma. Four decades of teaching at the preschool, elementary, high school, and university levels resulted in writing textbooks, consulting in schools, and conducting seminars in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Romania. Her work with thousands of parents and children provided insight for over fifteen hundred quotes in publications around the world. Wanda graduated from Texas Woman's University, with additional studies at Harvard University and The International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, Switzerland.
She consults privately with adults on developmental and parent-child relationship issues. For seven years she was a consultant for the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics and the State School for the Deaf.
As author of sixteen books and sixty audio and video programs, she has appeared on television, radio, and in newspaper and magazine media, including "The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Parent "magazine," "CNN World News, " The Oprah Winfrey Show," and Hong Kong Radio.""
Her work as a developmental epistemologist framed her contributions as a court consultant and expert witness in over one hundred capital crime and child custody cases. Twenty years of teaching human development to medical doctors in their psychiatry residency programs inspired her to found the Early Childhood Development Center, affiliated with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. She also served as co-director of the Diagnostic and Therapeutic Center for Young Children in the OU Department of Psychiatry, and president of Education Futures International. She is a recipient of the prestigious "Regents' Award for Excellence in Teaching "at the University of Oklahoma.
