I am a marital therapist with thirty-five years of experience helping couples fall back in love and deal with the fall out from infidelity. I trained with RELATE – the UK’s largest couple counselling charity – and have a private practice in Berlin and lead a team of therapists based in the UK. I have heard over a thousand couples argue – more often than not – about their children. So I am always looking for books that will give a wider perspective and practical advice on how to be a parent without exhausting your marriage and forgetting to still be lovers.
There are plenty of ‘how to’ books on being a mother but this looks at how having children changes you and what you learn about yourself. What makes this book profoundly helpful is that Lisa in a Jungian Analyst and she is not afraid to look at the dark as well as the light side of mothering. In my podcast, The Meaningful Life with Andrew G Marshall she talked about the moments where she crossed a line with her son and daughter and how owning ALL parts of you helps you learn and grow.
Motherhood is the true hero's journey-which is to say that it can be as harrowing as it is joyful, and enlightening as it is exhausting. For Jungian psychoanalyst Lisa Marchiano, this journey is not just an adventure of diaper bags and parent-teacher conferences, but one of intense self-discovery.
In Motherhood, Marchiano draws from a deep well of Jungian analysis and symbolic research to present a collection of fairytales, myths, and fables that evoke the spiritual arc of raising a child from infancy through adulthood. After all, this kind of storytelling has always been one of the most important conduits of…
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,…
Childhood is a special time but can also be wrought with severe challenges for some children. Children vary in emotional health and resilience, so we must provide extra support to those who struggle. I learned so much from the parents and therapists I interviewed for my book, about their experiences building resilience and emotional health in adopted children. I have a PhD in social work and have worked on federally funded child welfare and child trauma grants. Currently, I am a freelance writer and researcher and teach social policy and research courses at several graduate schools of social work, but my most demanding and rewarding job is being a mom!
This is one of the best books on raising resilient, emotionally healthy children. Generation Alpha is being bombarded by traumatic events which they learn about on YouTube, television, and from grownups around them talking about these events and the news. But there is a way to raise emotionally, healthy children even today and the key is teaching them resilience. There are so many great insights in this book but it’s practical and easy to digest. Our children have lost some of their resilience during the pandemic. It’s up to us, as adults in their lives – parents, teachers, counselors, and coaches – to re-instill a sense of security in our child’s lives but also the idea that once you’ve been through tough times other setbacks in life can seem easier to get through.
This title provides effective, proven advice for raising strong kids. 'A uniquely wise guide for parents. Brooks and Goldstein help mothers and fathers to focus on their child's strengths, not on his or her weaknesses. The result is a happier, more resilient child. This book could really make a difference in the life of a family' -Michael Thompson, author of "Raising Cain". 'Obviously written by talented therapists, Raising Resilient Children is such a well-written, easy-to-read, and helpful book for parents' - T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., author of "The Irreducible Needs of Children". In this seminal parenting work, renowned psychologists Robert…
I’m a child psychologist, mother of three, and parenting writer who reads way too much parenting content. My personal mission is to be a voice of science-based, compassionate, and realistic parenting guidance to counteract the pitfalls of modern parenting advice. As a psychologist, I know much of this advice lacks good science and even common sense. As a mother, I find a majority of parenting advice oppressive in its unrealistic expectations and a source of unnecessary guilt, shame, and feelings of failure—especially for mothers. I love highlighting the work of other parenting experts who share my mission: to empower and uplift parents with good information and authentic support.
Dr. Schonbrun turns the whole idea of work-life conflict on its head by reframing this tension not as a conflict of roles but as an opportunity for these roles to enrich each other with the science of work-life enrichment.
Basically, I discovered that being a parent can help me be better at my jobs and my work can help me be a better parent. Life-changing!
From each chapter, I got tips for how to work on my thoughts and behaviors to make this shift. I loved the book’s combination of ancient philosophy, current science, and real-life stories. Reading this changed my whole way of thinking about how to be a present mom and an ambitious professional.
Twelve practical strategies to experience more joy and feel less guilt as a working parent, drawn from ACT, the groundbreaking therapy technique that has helped countless people.
Dr. Yael Schonbrun calls out the myth of the work-life balance and offers practical strategies that can help us reframe our approach to working and parenting from the inside out. Based in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), these strategies won’t create more hours in the day, but they can shift how we label our experiences, revise the stories we tell…
It was almost by accident that I became who I turned out to be as a professional, a developmental scientist interested in how early-life experiences shape who we become. Had someone asked me when I graduated from high school what were the chances of me becoming a scientist and teacher, I would have answered “zero, zero”! During my now 40+ year academic career I've come to appreciate how complex the many forces are that shape who we become. There's no nature without nurture and no nurture without nature. This emergent realization led me to learn about and study many aspects of developmental experience, like parenting and peer relations, and the role of genetics and evolution.
Given my interests in nature and nurture, what I find especially fascinating is “the nature of nurture”. By this I mean how Darwinian natural selection has shaped the way our species rears its children and the effects such care has on them.
This book by a world-famous anthropologist beautifully, informative, and insightfully reveals how evolution has made us who we are as parents, people capable of unconditional love but by no means always dispensing it, sometimes the exact opposite—and why that is the case.
My passion for Africa came from my college days at Tennessee Temple University. Each year, the university would sponsor a missionary conference, and I always found myself drawn to the African exhibits. I am particularly passionate about missionary work in Africa and the challenges that it presents. Africa is a vast and splendid place with cultures as diverse as the climates in which they live. My research has only deepened my great love for this continent and the precious people who live there.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Too Small to Ignore. Dr. Wes Stafford, the son of missionaries, wrote amusing anecdotes of his boyhood adventures in a West African village. Also in the book, Dr. Stafford, head of Compassion International, writes of the challenges that children in Africa often face. This book is inspiring and captivating to read and will leave the reader with a greater understanding not only of the beautiful country of Africa but also of the compelling need to champion all the children of the world.
The time has come, argues Dr. Wess Stafford, for a major paradigm shift: Children are too important and too intensely loved by God to be left behind or left to chance. Children belong to all of us and we are compelled to intervene on their behalf. We must invest in children–all across the world. There are strategic, persuasive reasons–beyond love and kindness–to invest in children. Today they may snuggle into your lap, if you let them. But tomorrow you may not have access to them in the corridors of power they might occupy. Now is the time to shape the…
The Curiosity Cycle is a book for parents and educators who want to teach their children to be active explorers of the world. Learning through curiosity leads to adaptive thinking because your child is continually trying to improve his or her understanding of the world, and new facts and ideas…
I’ve been fascinated by relationships since I was a kid. I grew up a keen observer of the relationships in my own family, mostly focused on the way in which the dynamics were difficult for me. This led me to develop a strong interest in psychology, a passion I pursued in my undergraduate education. I became acutely intrigued by an idea a professor exposed me to early on – that experiences of safety and security within attachment relationships are essential in order for children to thrive, and that without safety/security, they can experience chronic struggles. This early interest paved the way for what developed into my career as a psychology professor and therapist.
In this book, Dr. Lieberman holds parents’ hands as she walks through toddlers’ emotional experiences.
She draws upon her work as both a clinician and a researcher in writing this book, leaving a narrative that is fresh and also well informed. As a long-time fan of Dr. Lieberman, I can feel her respect for young children emanating throughout this book.
Any parent who has tried to keep up with an active toddler for a whole day knows that a child of this age is a whirlwind of contradictory, explosive and ever-changing emotions. In this book, child psychologist Alicia Lieberman addresses common emotional issues and questions facing parents with children this age. Why, for example, is "no" often the favourite response of the toddler? How should parents deal with the anger they sometimes feel in the face of their toddler's unflagging obstinacy? Why does a crying toddler run to its mother for a hug, only to push himself away as soon…
I am an author, illustrator, and award-winning creative director. I have loved to draw and make things since a young age, mostly wacky contraptions (inspired by my love of the Hanna-Barbera Wacky Races cartoons). I’m particularly passionate about making the process of creating fun, the five books below definitely achieve that, each in its own unique way.
I could have picked any of the three Geek Dad books written by Ken Demnead, but I've gone for the first one. It's one of the books that helped establish the Dad 'maker' niche, and without it my book wouldn't have been written. Ken describes the projects as being the "sort of thing you can hack using the stuff lying around your garage", so expect low-fi assemblies and improvised ideas, rather than full-on craft builds that require a trip to the hardware store. The interior of the book includes some illustrations, but mostly it is text, however, for most people this will be no impediment as Geek Dad continues to provide doable and fun projects that Dads can make with their kids.
The ultimate DIY project guide for techie dads raising kids in their own geeky image, in the spirit of The Dangerous Book for Boys
Today's generation of dads grew up more tech-savvy than ever. Rather than joining the Little League team, many grew up playing computer games, Dungeons and Dragons, and watching Star Wars. Now with kids of their own, these digital-age dads are looking for fresh ways to share their love of science and technology, and help their kids develop a passion for learning and discovery.
Enter supergeek, and father of two, Ken Denmead. An engineer and editor of…
Resilience - helping people recover their capacities to deal with any adversity, stress, loss or trauma – is the heart of my work as a licensed psychotherapist (25 years) and an international trainer of mental health professionals (more than a decade). Bouncing Back is the book I wanted to be able to hand my clients to help them learn to use the capacities of resilience innate in their brains to develop more effective patterns of response to life crises and catastrophes. No such book was available at the time, so I wrote my own. It has become a tremendous resource for people to learn to how to be more resilient, and to learn that they can learn.
In a charming, reader-friendly style, this book offers ten universal principles for skillful parenting that lead to genuine goodness and happiness in their children. A delight to know it’s possible.
In every spiritual tradition, we find teachings on the virtues and qualities that we most want to pass on to our kids-such as generosity, kindness, honesty, determination, and patience. Today, a growing body of research from neuroscience and social psychology supports these teachings, offering insights into cultivating these virtues in ourselves and in our families. Raising Resilience is a practical guide for parents and educators of children from preschool through adolescence, detailing ten universal principles for happy families and thriving children.
Bridging the latest science with Eastern wisdom to explore ourselves and share with our children, Dr. Christopher Willard offers…
2024 Gold Winner, Benjamin Franklin Awards, Health & Fitness Category
2024 International Book Awards, Winner, Autobiography/Memoir Category and Health: Women's Health Category
A memoir of triumph in the face of a terrifying diagnosis, Up the Down Escalator recounts Dr. Lisa Doggett's startling shift from doctor to patient, as she learns…
As a dog behaviourist and parent, I realised there’s a huge crossover between raising dogs and children. We must alike create an environment they thrive and can learn in. We must fulfill their needs by nurturing, feeding & protecting them. We must listen to their concerns and build their confidence whilst simultaneously being an authority figure that sets boundaries. To do this I don’t believe there is one correct way for every dog or child. For that reason,I am very open-minded to each individual’s perspective as I believe you can learn something from everyone. From the research, I have done I present my 5 best books on parenting.
I found French Children Don’t Throw Food funny and inspiring in equal measures. The author humorously describes the differences in French and Anglophone parenting styles in a self-deprecating style. It’s not an overly prescriptive book, rather it is mainly the author detailing her own personal experiences, as an American mother living in Paris. The author highlights her pain and struggles of getting her child to eat, relax, and be on its own, compared to French children who seem to, in general, do it all with minimum effort from their parents. It’s a fun, easy to read book, which has many interesting observations and research. I found the style of French parenting and general attitude mirrored some of my approaches with dogs.
'Fascinating...gripping...extremely funny...I loved it. It made me want to move to Paris' - India Knight, Sunday Times _______
Do you want to learn the secrets of the parents of France's well-behaved children?
How come French babies sleep through the night? Why do French children happily eat what is put in front of them? How can French mothers chat to their friends while their children play quietly? _______
Parents are saying MERCI to Pamela Druckerman!
***** 'Our parenting bible' ***** 'You are not alone! ... Brilliantly funny and really helpful.' ***** 'Eye opening ... it has changed the way I view…
