Linda Budd, Ph.D.

Research With Passionate, Intense Children
Provides Strategies and Reassurance for Parents

Whether you’re scrapping with a second grader who insists that homework is busy work or overwhelmed by a teenager determined to single-handedly right every social wrong, you’ll appreciate the perspective that Linda Budd provides after almost three decades of work with these special children.

The author of Living with the Active Alert Child: Groundbreaking Strategies for Parents, now revised and expanded to include teenagers, this popular book helps parents understand what motivates these bright, capable–and exhausting–children. Dr. Budd’s case histories and anecdotes also give parents strategies for surviving their children’s youth and provide reassurance.

“These kids are often not well adjusted socially,” she points out. “The extroverted ones don’t pick up on boundaries and they blurt out comments that may be truthful–but simply aren’t appropriate.”

Moreover, the “active alert” children know they are different and that impacts their sense of self-esteem.

“They are intense and they can’t understand why others aren’t intense, too,” Dr. Budd notes.

The “active alert” is often perceived as a rebel. These are the kids who think “outside the box,” who question what’s fair, who are willing to challenge teachers and other adults in positions of authority.

“What they don’t understand is that they will never win with a teacher,” says Dr. Budd, “because the teacher has the political clout.”

Sound like your child? Then you’ll be glad to know there is light at the end of the tunnel. Dr. Budd, who has stayed in touch with most of the children profiled in her original book, believes things get easier when “active alerts” go to college. And as adults, she exclaims, “They’re wonderful!”

These, she assures parents, are the kids who grow up to start companies, who do wonderful things for society. “Some I would call hyper-focused. They take an idea and make it happen.”

Now a counselor in private practice and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Budd earned her Master of Arts in Family Social Science in 1973 and her doctorate in the same discipline in 1976.