Here are 100 books that Preparing for Parenthood fans have personally recommended if you like
Preparing for Parenthood.
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As a trained therapist, educator, and coach for expectant and new parents, I understand on a deep level the importance of creating a strong foundation in building a family. I also was personally humbled at how difficult the transition to parenthood was for me and the challenges it presented in my relationship with my husband. While we’ve grown exponentially, I wanted to make it a little easier for other expectant parents to avoid some of the pitfalls that aren’t spoken about as much in becoming parents. I also wanted to help the new little beings arriving in the world to have more resourced, present parents. It’s a win-win.
Relationship experts who studied couples for years in the Love Lab in Seattle, the Gottmans understand that bringing a baby into the orbit of a couple nearly inevitably strains even the best relationship. They discovered that 2/3rds of couples experienced a significant decline in relationship satisfaction after having a baby. Their six-step plan helps expectant couples prepare for this huge transition by showing them ways to create an environment that nurtures intimacy, appreciation, and self- and couple-care.
Congratulations! You have a new baby. Don’t forget you also have a marriage.
Having a baby is a joyous experience, but even the best relationships are strained during the transition from duo to trio. In And Baby Makes Three, Love Lab™ experts John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman teach couples the skills needed to maintain healthy marriages, so partners can avoid the pitfalls of parenthood by:
• Focusing on intimacy and romance • Replacing an atmosphere of criticism and irritability with one of appreciation • Preventing postpartum depression • Creating a home environment that nurtures physical, emotional, and mental health,…
Around 25 years ago, I thought my husband and I were ready for parenthood…until we got there. And as a relationship counselor, I was listening to countless stories of couples struggling through the rollercoaster ride of becoming a family too. So I wondered: can couples actually prepare for this? For years I waited for a book to recommend to my clients to guide them after our sessions ended and I ended up writing (an award-winning) one instead. This turned into training for professionals, and now expectant couples are doing Becoming Us courses at the hospitals where our three children were born. And, thankfully, there are more books to support new families too!
From the well-known author of Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts, this book gets straight to the heart of the matter. Through on-point illustrations, it shows tired and time-poor parents how having a baby impacts a couple’s relationship, what’s really going on inside both of them, what the big issues are, and how to get through this trying time together. Parents will see themselves in the pages and find reassurance that they’re normal, not alone and it won’t last forever. I can imagine couples sitting in bed at night and having a good chuckle, maybe a good cry, and then an even better cuddle afterward. I'm honored that renowned maternal mental health expert and author Karen Kleinman recommends Becoming Us for further reading.
Best for: new parents who don’t know which way is up and for therapists working with new parents who are struggling.
The demands of a new baby can test a couple’s relationship like nothing else! When we factor in sleep deprivation, hormonal changes, depression and anxiety, and different personalities, life with a newborn can feel a bit CRAZY. Couples tend to misinterpret this rough patch as a sign that something is wrong with the relationship, but when couples take steps toward open communication and safeguard their relationship, they can face everything new parenthood throws at them together. From the team behind the bestselling Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts comes a new guidebook of short essays, comics, and quick journal prompts about…
Around 25 years ago, I thought my husband and I were ready for parenthood…until we got there. And as a relationship counselor, I was listening to countless stories of couples struggling through the rollercoaster ride of becoming a family too. So I wondered: can couples actually prepare for this? For years I waited for a book to recommend to my clients to guide them after our sessions ended and I ended up writing (an award-winning) one instead. This turned into training for professionals, and now expectant couples are doing Becoming Us courses at the hospitals where our three children were born. And, thankfully, there are more books to support new families too!
I love Catherine’s sense of humor. Even the contents page makes me laugh out loud! Catherine shares anecdotes from her own relationship with her husband Rick and examples from other couples that make this book really relatable and easy to digest. Happy With Baby provides concrete, real-world advice, lots of compassion, and inspiration for some specific topics not covered by other books including: overcoming a hard pregnancy, three questions to ask daily for better communication between partners, what to say when mom needs to take self-care and handling unwanted parenting advice that can sometimes create conflict between parents. There’s plenty of empathy in here and also some good laughs.
Best for: new parents and friends of new parents to recommend to them.
Less sleep, stressful life changes, and even postpartum depression are things most new parents know are possible when baby comes home.
Sudden relationship and personal challenges might come as a big surprise though! Navigating life as a family can be harder than expected. Between unwanted parenting advice and no time for self-care, good communication with your partner can halt to a standstill. Your once-steady partner suddenly feels like part of the problem.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Catherine O’Brien and her husband lay out the communication skills and relationship strategies that new moms and dads need during baby’s first year…
As a trained therapist, educator, and coach for expectant and new parents, I understand on a deep level the importance of creating a strong foundation in building a family. I also was personally humbled at how difficult the transition to parenthood was for me and the challenges it presented in my relationship with my husband. While we’ve grown exponentially, I wanted to make it a little easier for other expectant parents to avoid some of the pitfalls that aren’t spoken about as much in becoming parents. I also wanted to help the new little beings arriving in the world to have more resourced, present parents. It’s a win-win.
Attachment theory – the theory that humans need to form a close emotional bond with a caregiver early in life to survive and thrive – is near and dear to my heart as a therapist and coach for expectant and new parents. Tatkin is a master of human attachment in adult relationships, having created the PACT (psychobiological approach to couple therapy) training for therapists. The book, written with Hoppe, uses the science behind attachment theory to help couples strengthen their relationship and meet each other’s needs as a couple in order to be the best parents they can be. It offers tried and true ways to nurture your couple bond so you can not only be present for your baby, but also for each other.
Before you succeed at parenting, you need to succeed as a couple! Baby Bomb is the resource you need when a new baby turns your life-and your romantic relationship-upside down. A baby is a blessing-and also a completely life-altering event. If you're like many new parents, nothing could have fully prepared you for the exhaustion of late-night feedings, the explosive diapers, the evaporation of your free time, the pure joy, and the moments of pure terror. In the midst of these hazy, early months, it's normal to feel overwhelmed. And when you're overwhelmed, it's easy to put your romantic relationship…
I wear many hats in my life, but none matter as much as the hat: mama. As a clairaudient medium who works first-hand with mothers on their spiritual journeys, I feel as though I know what spiritually conscious parents hope to find and be moved by in the books they read because I know what my spirit needs during this wild and overwhelming adventure called motherhood. It can be an isolating path to walk, and these books not only felt like a helping hand during the rockiest moments but also like a warm hug when I needed it most.
This was the very first spiritual motherhood book I found shortly after discovering I was pregnant and, let me tell you, I’m glad it was this book!
Sacred Pregnancy is divided into weeks. The experience is like consuming profound aphorisms, ideas, and reflective journaling activities that will nourish both you - fatigued and very pregnant mama - and the child you will be raising very soon.
Not only did I become excited about every new week along my pregnancy journey, I looked forward to every new week diving into this book, with its informative and transformative content. I loved it so much that I bought the corresponding oracle deck to continue my weekly bonding with my unborn child.
In today's western cultures, the typical pregnancy focuses on the baby to the exclusion of the woman herself, so that the entire experience has become more about preparing for the baby's arrival than looking closely at oneself to prepare emotionally for all of the changes that creating a new life brings. Sacred Pregnancy was written to help the pregnant woman journey within herself to prepare for the birth of her baby.
Sacred Pregnancy is a gorgeous four-color book especially created for mothers-to-be to reflect on the many personal milestones of the full gestation period of a pregnancy. With beautiful professional…
There is a dearth of books that span the emotional journey into motherhood. An old adage directs authors to write the book they would like to read, so I kept that in mind as I began the journey myself. Throughout my pregnancy and postpartum experience, I was often surprised by perfectly ordinary occurrences that aren’t often discussed. There is a hush cast on anything that isn’t purely nurturing and romantic, which means that mothers who encounter unpleasantness are blindsided, and consider themselves aberrations. I wrote my book as honestly as possible to normalize the normal and to offer myself as a compatriot to those mothers.
This book delves into the science of pregnancy, but through a feminist lens. Through extensive research, Garbes details just how the female body creates life, a sometimes grisly and often wonderous process, as well as pans across our culture, with all its pitfalls, to explain just why women deserve better support through medical care and social nets.
A candid, feminist, and personal deep dive into the science and culture of pregnancy and motherhood
Like most first-time mothers, Angela Garbes was filled with questions when she became pregnant. What exactly is a placenta and how does it function? How does a body go into labor? Why is breast best? Is wine totally off-limits? But as she soon discovered, it’s not easy to find satisfying answers. Your obstetrician will cautiously quote statistics; online sources will scare you with conflicting and often inaccurate data; and even the most trusted books will offer information with a heavy dose of judgment. To…
When I first became a mother, life as I knew it disappeared. I REALLY struggled with new motherhood, and funny, relatable books about parenthood showed me I wasn’t alone. Early motherhood inspired me to write the Bad Mother’s Diary – mainly because I wanted to cheer myself up and turn difficulty into comedy. I loved writing the Bad Mother’s series and am so honoured by all the emails and Facebook comments I receive begging for more books. Thank you readers!
This book is not a how-to-guide. It won't tell you how to get your baby to sleep, how to deal with toddler tantrums, how to be a good parent, a cool parent or even a renegade parent. It is a book about parenting that contains absolutely no useful advice whatsoever.
Instead it shares beautifully honest anecdotes and illustrations from the parenting frontline that demonstrate it is perfectly possible to love your children with the whole of your heart whilst finding them incredibly irritating at the same time.
From pregnancy to starting school, Hurrah For Gin takes you through the exciting,…
There is a dearth of books that span the emotional journey into motherhood. An old adage directs authors to write the book they would like to read, so I kept that in mind as I began the journey myself. Throughout my pregnancy and postpartum experience, I was often surprised by perfectly ordinary occurrences that aren’t often discussed. There is a hush cast on anything that isn’t purely nurturing and romantic, which means that mothers who encounter unpleasantness are blindsided, and consider themselves aberrations. I wrote my book as honestly as possible to normalize the normal and to offer myself as a compatriot to those mothers.
This new memoir (out 2022) is about a New Yorker who marries, buys a decaying farmhouse, and shortly thereafter is diagnosed with a high-risk pregnancy, committing her to five months of bed rest. While horizontal, she confronts grief over the death of her father and struggles to hold her marriage together. Though this story is narrated in a humorous voice, Weintraub deals with tough issues, including the merits of prenatal restrictions, demanding we take better care when handling maternal mental health.
A laugh-out-loud memoir about a free-spirited, commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl who, after a whirlwind romance, finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, pregnant, and faced with five months of doctor-prescribed bed rest because of unusually large fibroids.
Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu…
I am fascinated by how gender and sex, characteristics of our beings that we take to be the most intimate and personal, are just as subject to external forces as anything else in history. I have written about the cultivation of masculinity in college fraternities, the history of young people and the age of consent to marriage, and about a same-sex couple who lived publicly as “father and son” in order to be together. My most recent book is a biography of an abortion provider in nineteenth-century America who became the symbol that doctors and lawyers demonized as they worked to make abortion a crime. I am a professor at the University of Kansas.
The word “abortionist” usually conjures up images of dangerous back alleys where untrained men take advantage of women.
In the case of Rickie Solinger’s book, instead, we meet Ruth Barnett, who performed approximately 40,000 abortions in the mid-twentieth century (1918-1968) in Portland, Oregon, without losing a single patient.
What I loved about this book is how Solinger takes us behind the scenes of a thoroughly illegal abortion clinic that still managed to provide expert care to all its patients, even as it sought to evade the law and its enforcers at every turn.
Prior to Roe v. Wade, hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions occurred in the United States every year. Rickie Solinger uses the story of Ruth Barnett, an abortionist in Portland, Oregon, between 1918 and 1968 to demonstrate that it was the law, not so-called back-alley practitioners, that most endangered women's lives in the years before abortion was legal. Women from all walks of life came to Ruth Barnett to seek abortions. For most of her career she worked in a proper suite of offices, undisturbed by legal authorities. In her years of practice she performed forty thousand abortions and never…
I’ve been an avid reader since childhood. I read almost all genres, but my favorite type of book has always been the kind that you associate with a beach bag and a lazy day of reading in the sun (and maybe even a beverage nearby with a tiny umbrella). I love books that provide a realistic escape, where I can lose myself in the descriptions of picturesque scenery and flawed but lovable characters. Not surprisingly, these are also the types of books I’ve chosen to write. I want to give readers the same joy of sitting back on a chaise lounge with a piña colada (perhaps metaphorically) and disappearing into the fictional world I’ve created.
Something Blue has some of the best possible ingredients for a great women’s fiction novel—forgiveness, personal transformation, friendship that blossoms into more, and the icing on the cake is that it’s set in London! The book focuses primarily on Darcy, who finds herself alone and friendless for the first time in her life. She’s not particularly likable at the beginning of the novel. Still, Giffin does an excellent job of making the reader connect with Darcy, invest in her transformation, and root for a happy ending. Although I don’t have much in common with Darcy, her experiences with pregnancy and childbirth in London caused me to reminisce about my own time living in London and the birth of my first child there. Due to the beautiful descriptions of the setting and the subject matter, it was like a walk down memory lane when I read Something Blue.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Something Borrowed comes a novel that shows how someone with a ‘perfect life' can lose it all—and then find everything.
Darcy Rhone thought she had it all figured out: the more beautiful the girl, the more charmed her life. Never mind substance. Never mind playing by the rules. Never mind karma.
But Darcy's neat, perfect world turns upside down when her best friend, Rachel, the plain-Jane "good girl," steals her fiancé, while Darcy finds herself completely alone for the first time in her life…with a baby on the way.
