I'm the mother of three children, ages 6, 3, and 1, and because I tend to write about what interests me, started to investigate the world of parenting when my eldest was born. (Prior to that, I was a food reporter and editor.) As my husband, a tech entrepreneur, kept bringing home pieces of technology that were supposed to make my life easier (spoiler alert: they rarely did), I found myself urgently trying to figure out what was best for my kids, and myself: the boring pile of blocks, or the flashy, sexy iPad? I spent years delving into the fields of neurobiology, psychology, philosophy, and pediatrics to get a better handle on these questions.
I wrote...
Baby, Unplugged: One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age
The mother of two young daughters, journalist Sophie Brickman wondered what living in a tech-saturated world was doing to her and her children. She turned to experts, academics, doctors, and innovators for advice and insight. Baby, Unplugged brings together Brickman’s in-depth research with her own candid (sometimes hilarious) personal experience to help parents sort through the wide and often confusing tech offerings available today and to sort out what’s helpful and what’s not.
Filled with relatable and entertaining stories as well as practical takeaways, Baby, Unplugged is destined to become a touchstone for parents today, giving them the permission to forge their own path through the morass of technological options, to restore their faith in themselves, and to help them raise good, social, and engaged people in the modern world.
Alison Gopnik is a towering figure in the field of developmental psychology, and interviewing her at her Berkeley lab was one of the highlights of my reporting for my own book. She tackles parenting from a particularly erudite and academic angle, pulling on psychology, evolutionary biology, and more to persuade parents that parenting is, in fact—and in her words—“a mug’s game.” We may think we are carpenters, building a perfect specimen of child, but in fact the best way to raise resilient, successful kids is to act like a gardener, providing the right environment in which they can thrive. I found it to be a particularly calming message, and one that will resonate with anyone who agonizes over minute decisions.
In The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik, one of the world's leading child psychologists, illuminates the paradoxes of parenthood from a scientific perspective and shatters the myth of "good parenting".
Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call “parenting” is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion-dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult.
This enjoyable, first-person romp about raising kids in France is a must-read for any francophile. Druckerman is an American who married a Brit, and they relocated to Paris, where they had three children. With a reporter’s eye, Druckerman tackles such questions as, how on earth do French parents have their kids sleeping through the night at a few weeks old, and how is it that French children sit down to civilized three-course meals when they aren’t yet three feet tall?
"On questions of how to live, the French never disappoint. . . . Maybe it all starts with childhood. That is the conclusion that readers may draw from Bringing Up Bebe." -The Wall Street Journal
"I've been a parent now for more than eight years, and-confession-I've never actually made it all the way through a parenting book. But I found Bringing Up Bebe to be irresistible." -Slate
The runaway New York Times bestseller that shows American parents the secrets behind France's amazingly well-behaved children, from the author of There Are No Grown-ups.
When American journalist Pamela Druckerman had a baby…
Palfrey is not just a known authority on internet law and emerging media, but also the former head of the prep school Phillips Academy, Andover; the former executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, a research center that studies cyberspace and internet-related legal issues; the head of the MacArthur Foundation; and, I learned before speaking with him, a great-great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. This book, newly updated, delves into the myriad permutations of what it means to grow up in a digital world, with your every move captured and publicized. Yes, it focuses on children growing up digital, but it will be of interest to anyone who has questions and concerns about the future of privacy—meaning, just about all of us.
The first generation of children who were born into and raised in the digital world are coming of age and reshaping the world in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture, and even the shape of our family life are being transformed. But who are these wired young people? And what is the world they're creating going to look like? In this revised and updated edition, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a cutting-edge sociological portrait of these young people, who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and…
Yes, it’s a tome, but man, is it a good one. In this influential book about women’s role in evolution, the lauded evolutionary theorist explicates how critical it was to the human species that we were cooperative breeders—meaning, in so many words, that it takes a village. Grandparents helped, aunts and uncles helped, way back when we were hunter-gatherers, and that kind of communal child rearing is deep in our blood. Understanding these roots puts into relief just how backwards we are, in modern society, when we expect nuclear families to shoulder everything on their own.
Mother Nature is the big new popular science book for the end of the millennium. It starts from the standpoint of Darwinist evolutionary theory, but turns it on its head. It is the first such major book by a women, qho ia professor of SocioBiology at the University of California, trained in Anthropology and an expert on Primates in particular. She's also one of the few women members fo the US Academy of Sciences. It's not for nothing that Nature is known as Mother Nature. Evolution is controlled, Hrdy demonstrates, not by the male of species, but by the female…
Fass is the professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught for thirty-six years, and the author of numerous books on children’s history. This one I found to be particularly illuminating, as she traces the history of American childhood and parenting from the 1700s to today, wrestling with how shifting American notions of independence and success in turn affected how children were viewed, and how parents parented. For any history buff.
The End of American Childhood takes a sweeping look at the history of American childhood and parenting, from the nation's founding to the present day. Renowned historian Paula Fass shows how, since the beginning of the American republic, independence, self-definition, and individual success have informed Americans' attitudes toward children. But as parents today hover over every detail of their children's lives, are the qualities that once made American childhood special still desired or possible? Placing the experiences of children and parents against the backdrop of social, political, and cultural shifts, Fass challenges Americans to reconnect with the beliefs that set…
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives about adoption, exposing the fallacy that adoption is always good.
In this story, I reckon with the pain and unanswered questions of my own experience and explore broader issues surrounding adoption in the United States, including changing legal policies, sterilization, and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children. Now is the moment we must all hear these stories.
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
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