How to Raise a Reader


Pamela Paul - 2019
      Do you remember your first visit to where the wild things are? How about curling up for hours on end to discover the secret of the Sorcerer’s Stone? Combining clear, practical advice with inspiration, wisdom, tips, and curated reading lists, How to Raise a Reader shows you how to instill the joy and time-stopping pleasure of reading.   Divided into four sections, from baby through teen, and each illustrated by a different artist, this book offers something useful on every page, whether it’s how to develop rituals around reading or build a family library, or ways to engage a reluctant reader. A fifth section, “More Books to Love: By Theme and Reading Level,” is chockful of expert recommendations. Throughout, the authors debunk common myths, assuage parental fears, and deliver invaluable lessons in a positive and easy-to-act-on way.

Raising a Sensory Smart Child: The Definitive Handbook for Helping Your Child with Sensory Integration Issues


Lindsey Biel - 2005
    Now as awareness of this condition reaches an all-time high, this comprehensive guidebook offers cutting-edge advice to parents of SI children. Written by an occupational therapist and a parent with a child with SI dysfunction, "Raising a Sensory Smart Child makes it easy for readers to recognize and understand their child's sensory issues and to find the best treatment for their child's needs.

On Becoming Baby Wise: Giving Your Infant the Gift of Nighttime Sleep


Gary Ezzo - 1993
    On Becoming Babywise brings hope to the tired and bewildered parents looking for an alternative to sleepless nights and fussy babies. The Babywise Parent Directed Feeding concept has enough structure to bring security and order to your baby's world, yet enough flexibility to give mom freedom to respond to any need at any time. It teaches parents how to lovingly guide their baby's day rather than be guided or enslaved to the infant's unknown needs. The information contained within On Becoming Babywise is loaded with success. Comprehensive breast-feeding follow-up surveys spanning three countries, of mothers using the PDF method verify that as a result of the PDF concepts, 88% breast-feed, compared to the national average of only 54% (from the National Center for Health Statistics). Of these breast-feeding mothers, 80% of them breast-feed exclusively without a formula complement. And while 70% of our mothers are still breast-feeding after six months, the national average encourage to follow demand feeding without any guidelines is only 20%. The mean average time of breast-feeding for PDF moms is 33 1/2 weeks, well above the national average. Over 50% of PDF mothers extend their breast-feeding toward and well into the first year. Added to these statistics is another critical factor. The average breast-fed PDF baby sleeps continuously through night seven to eight hours between weeks seven and nine. Healthy sleep in infants is analogous to healthy growth and development. Find out for yourself why a world of parents and pediatricians utilize the concepts found in On Becoming Babywise.

How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare


Ken Ludwig - 2013
    Many of the best novels, plays, poetry, and films in the English language produced since Shakespeare’s death in 1616—from Jane Austen to The Godfather—are heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s stories, characters, language, and themes.  In a sense, his works are a kind of Bible for the modern world, bringing us together intellectually and spiritually.  Hamlet, Juliet, Macbeth, Ophelia, and a vast array of other singular Shakespearean characters have become the archetypes of our consciousness. To know some Shakespeare provides a head start in life.  In How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, acclaimed playwright Ken Ludwig provides the tools you need to instill an understanding, and a love, of Shakespeare’s works in your children, and to have fun together along the way.Ken Ludwig devised his methods while teaching his own children, and his approach is friendly and easy to master. Beginning with  memorizing short specific passages from Shakespeare's plays, this method then instills children with cultural references they will utilize for years to come. Ludwig’s approach includes understanding of the time period and implications of Shakespeare’s diction as well as the invaluable lessons behind his words and stories.  Colorfully incorporating the history of Shakespearean theater and society, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare guides readers on an informed and adventurous journey through the world in which the Bard wrote.This book’s simple process allows anyone to impart to children the wisdom of plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. And there’s fun to be had along the way. Shakespeare novices and experts, and readers of all ages, will each find something delightfully irresistible in How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling


John Taylor Gatto - 1991
    This Special Collector's Edition celebrates 100,000 copies or the book in print, and the book's on-going importance and popularity.

Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love


Robert Karen - 1994
    How are our personalities formed? How do our early struggles with our parents reappear in the way we relate to others as adults?In Becoming Attached, Robert Karen offers fresh insight into some of the most fundamental issues of emotional life. He explores such questions as: * What do children need to feel that the world is a positive place and that they have value? * What are the risks of day care for children under one year of age, and what can parents do to manage those risks? * What experiences in infancy will enable a person to develop healthy relationships as an adult?Becoming Attached is not just a voyage of discovery in child emotional development and its pertinence to adult life but a voyage of personal discovery as well, for it is impossible to read this book without reflecting on one's own life as a child, a parent, and an intimate partner in love or marriage.

A Mind at a Time


Mel Levine - 2002
    Mel Levine, one of the best-known learning experts and pediatricians in America today. Some students are strong in certain areas and some are strong in others, but no one is equally capable in all. Yet most schools still cling to a one-size-fits-all education philosophy. As a result, many children struggle because their learning patterns don't fit the way they are being taught. In his #1 New York Times bestseller A Mind at a Time, Dr. Levine shows parents and those who care for children how to identify these individual learning patterns, explaining how they can strengthen a child's abilities and either bypass or help overcome the child's weaknesses, producing positive results instead of repeated frustration and failure. Consistent progress can result when we understand that not every child can do equally well in every type of learning and begin to pay more attention to individual learning patterns -- and individual minds -- so that we can maximize children's success and gratification in life. In A Mind at a Time Dr. Levine shows us how.

Give Your Child the World: Raising Globally Minded Kids One Book at a Time


Jamie C. Martin - 2016
    But as they grow, worries often crowd out wonder. Knowing this, how can parents strengthen their kids’ love for the world so it sticks around for the long haul?Thankfully, parents have at their fingertips a miracle vaccine—one that can boost their kids' immunity to the world’s distractions. Well-chosen stories connect us with others, even those on the other side of the globe. Build your kids’ lives on a story-solid foundation and you’ll give them armor to shield themselves from the world’s cynicism. You’ll give them confidence to persevere in the face of life’s conflicts. You’ll give them a reservoir of compassion that spills over into a lifetime of love in action.Give Your Child the World features inspiring stories, practical suggestions, and carefully curated reading lists of the best children’s literature for each area of the globe. Reading lists are organized by region, country, and age range (ages 4-12). Each listing includes a brief description of the book, its themes, and any content of which parents should be aware.Parents can introduce their children to the world from the comfort of home by simply opening a book together. Give Your Child the World is poised to become a bestselling family reading treasury that promotes literacy, develops a global perspective, and strengthens family bonds while increasing faith and compassion.

I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey through the Science of Sound and Language


Lydia Denworth - 2014
    Her sweet boy with the big brown eyes had probably never heard her lullabies.Denworth knew the importance of enrichment to the developing brain but had never contemplated the opposite: Deprivation.  How would a child’s brain grow outside the world of sound most of us take for granted? How would he communicate?  Would he learn to read and write—weren’t phonics a key to literacy? How long did they have until Alex’s brain changed irrevocably? In her drive to understand the choices—starting with the angry debate between supporters of American Sign Language and the controversial but revolutionary cochlear implant—Denworth soon found that every decision carried weighty scientific, social and even political implications.  As she grappled with the complex collisions between the emerging field of brain plasticity, the possibilities of modern technology, and the changing culture of the Deaf community, she gained a new appreciation of the exquisite relationship between sound, language and learning.  It became clear that Alex’s ears—and indeed everyone’s—were just the beginning.An acclaimed science journalist as well as a mother, Denworth interviewed the world’s experts on language development, inventors of ground-breaking technology, Deaf leaders, and neuroscientists at the frontiers of research.  She presents insights from studies of everything from at-risk kids in Head Start to noisy cocktail party conversation, from songbirds to signal processing, and from the invention of the telephone to sign language.Weaving together tales from the centuries-long quest to develop the cochlear implant and simultaneous leaps in neuroscientific knowledge against a tumultuous backdrop of identity politics, I Can Hear You Whisper shows how sound sculpts our children’s brains and the life changing consequences of that delicate process.

Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined


Scott Barry Kaufman - 2013
    Gifted and Talented Programs. Perfect 2400s on the SAT. Sometimes it feels like the world is conspiring to make the rest of us feel inadequate. Those children tapped as possessing special abilities will go on to achieve great things, while the rest of us have little chance of realizing our dreams. Right? In Ungifted, cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman -- who was relegated to special education as a child -- sets out to show that the way we interpret traditional metrics of intelligence is misguided. Kaufman explores the latest research in genetics and neuroscience, as well as evolutionary, developmental, social, positive, and cognitive psychology, to challenge the conventional wisdom about the childhood predictors of adult success. He reveals that there are many paths to greatness, and argues for a more holistic approach to achievement that takes into account each young person's personal goals, individual psychology, and developmental trajectory. In so doing, he increases our appreciation for the intelligence and diverse strengths of prodigies, savants, and late bloomers, as well as those with dyslexia, autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD. Combining original research, anecdotes, and a singular compassion, Ungifted proves that anyone -- even those without readily observable gifts at any single moment in time -- can become great.

The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive


W. Thomas Boyce - 2019
         In Tom Boyce's extraordinary new book, he explores the "dandelion" child (hardy, resilient, healthy), able to survive and flourish under most circumstances, and the "orchid" child (sensitive, susceptible, fragile), who, given the right support, can thrive as much as, if not more than, other children.      Boyce writes of his pathfinding research as a developmental pediatrician working with troubled children in child-development research for almost four decades, and explores his major discovery that reveals how genetic make-up and environment shape behavior. He writes that certain variant genes can increase a person's susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors. But rather than seeing this "risk" gene as a liability, Boyce, through his daring research, has recast the way we think of human frailty, and has shown that while these "bad" genes can create problems, they can also, in the right setting and the right environment, result in producing children who not only do better than before but far exceed their peers. Orchid children, Boyce makes clear, are not failed dandelions; they are a different category of child, with special sensitivities and strengths, and need to be nurtured and taught in special ways. And in The Orchid and the Dandelion, Boyce shows us how to understand these children for their unique sensibilities, their considerable challenges, their remarkable gifts.

Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood


Edward M. Hallowell - 1992
    Discusses the causes, symptoms, and treatment of attention-deficit Disorder (ADD).

Calm and Compassionate Children: A Handbook


Susan Usha Dermond - 2007
    From nature activities to conscious quiet time to tips on daily routines, CALM AND COMPASSIONATE CHILDREN provides practical guidance to help grown-ups model behavior and suggests dozens of activities to foster children's joy, wonder, kindness, and love. A parents' and teachers' guide to developing children's concentration, self-discipline, and compassion, as well as heartfelt qualities like openness and enthusiasm.Includes more than 90 techniques and exercises drawn from the author's experiences as a teacher and director of the Living Wisdom School, a nonprofit elementary school that emphasizes nonsectarian spiritual principles and practical skills for living.Recommends books, music, games, and other resources to help grown-ups nurture calm and compassionate kids.

Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents


Christine Carter - 2010
    Drawing on what psychology, sociology, and neuroscience have proven about confidence, gratefulness, and optimism, and using her own chaotic and often hilarious real-world adventures as a mom to demonstrate do’s and don’ts in action, Christine Carter, Ph.D, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, boils the process down to 10 simple happiness-inducing steps.With great wit, wisdom, and compassion, Carter covers the day-to-day pressure points of parenting—how best to discipline, get kids to school and activities on time, and get dinner on the table—as well as the more elusive issues of helping children build healthy friendships and develop emotional intelligence. In these 10 key steps, she helps you interact confidently and consistently with your kids to foster the skills, habits, and mindsets that will set the stage for positive emotions now and into their adolescence and beyond. Inside you will discover • the best way avoid raising a brat—changing bad habits into good ones• tips on how to change your kids’ attitude into gratitude• the trap of trying to be perfect—and how to stay clear of its pitfalls • the right way to praise kids—and why too much of the wrong kind can be just as bad as not enough• the spirit of kindness—how to raise kind, compassionate, and loving children• strategies for inspiring kids to do boring (but necessary) tasks—and become more self-motivated in the process Complete with a series of “try this” tips, secrets, and strategies, Raising Happiness is a one-of-a-kind resource that will help you instill joy in your kids—and, in the process, become more joyful yourself.

The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language


Kendall King - 2007
    Parents spend millions of dollars every year on classes, computer programs, and toys, all of which promise to help children learn a second language. But many of their best efforts (and investments) end in disappointment.In The Bilingual Edge, professors and parents King and Mackey wade through the hype and provide clear insights into what actually works. No matter what your language background is—whether you never passed Spanish in high school or you speak Mandarin fluently—King and Mackey will help you:select the language that will give your child the most benefitsfind materials and programs that will assist your child in achieving fluencyidentify and use your family's unique traits to maximize learningFancy private schools and expensive materials aren't needed. Instead, The Bilingual Edge translates the latest research into interactive strategies and quick tips that even the busiest parents can use.