Kathleen Burns, author of Top Students, Top Parents. is a veteran educator with twenty years experience teaching nine-and ten-year olds. In 1992 she founded Parents as Partners In Education, a non-profit organization originally called Head Start for Parents. In this capacity she also taught parents how to prepare their children for success in school. She earned her teaching degree in Behavioral Sciences from Southern Colorado State College in 1972. She's the mother of three children, born within four years of each other, and three grandchildren. The years spent with her own children, one of whom had severe medical and learning disabilities, combined with the close relationship she had with over one thousand nine-and ten-year-olds, has given her a unique perspective in dealing with the stress, heartache, and all the other day-to-day problems parents encounter while trying to raise their children. During all these years of daily contact with so many students, she developed a deep empathy and insight into the mental trauma that many poorly prepared children go through while attempting to adhere to the norms of school and society. She was able to witness, first hand, the differences in the behaviors and developmental stages resulting from educationally lacking environments those that were educationally superior. These years of experience led her to understand why so many children remain at the top of the class and why so many suffer from a learning deficiency, each of which are to be laid at the doorstep of their formative years. The suggestions in this book are based not only on her acquired insight and experience with her own children and the needs of parents and their children whom she taught, but also from the results of studies made by numerous qualified doctors, professors, child development experts, neuroscientists, psychiatrists and psychologists who have studied child behavior for many years and who have come to the same conclusion, that the type of student a child becomes is determined by her home environment and the relationship she had with her parents.