Spock meets Judge Judy--finally a parenting book that separates fact from fiction. What if you could bottle the wisdom of all those parents who've come before you...and combine them with the sold medical advice from an award-winning pediatrician? Baby 411 is the answer.

    As a RIE teacher and student of pioneering child specialist Magda Gerber, her advice is not based solely on formal studies and the research of others, but also on her twenty years of hands-on experience guiding hundreds of parents and their toddlers. “No Bad Kids” is a collection of Janet's most popular and widely read articles pertaining to common toddler behaviors and how respectful parenting practices can be applied to benefit both parents and children. It covers such common topics as punishment, cooperation, boundaries, testing, tantrums, hitting, and more. “No Bad Kids” provides a practical, indispensable tool for parents who are anticipating or experiencing those critical years when toddlers are developmentally obliged to test the limits of our patience and love. Armed with knowledge and a clearer sense of the world through our children’s eyes, this period of uncertainty can afford a myriad of opportunities to forge unbreakable bonds of trust and respect.

    Fountain’s voice is at once deep and loose, enacting the dawning of spiritual insight, but without leaving the daily world, matching the feeling of the “pure holiness in motherhood” with the “thuds the giant dumpsters make behind the strip mall when they’re tossed back to the pavement by the trash truck.” In these wise, accessible, deeply emotional poems, she captures a contemporary longing for spiritual meaning that’s wary of prepackaged wisdom—a longing answered most fully by attending to the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

    Now, however, conversation has turned to whether it's necessary to have it all or, perhaps more controversial, whether children are really a requirement for a fulfilling life. The idea that some women and men prefer not to have children is often met with sharp criticism and incredulity by the public and mainstream media.In this provocative and controversial collection of essays, curated by writer Meghan Daum, sixteen acclaimed writers explain why they have chosen to eschew parenthood. Contributors Lionel Shriver, Sigrid Nunez, Kate Christiensen, Elliott Holt, Geoff Dyer, and Tim Kreider, among others, offer a unique perspective on the overwhelming cultural pressure of parenthood.Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed makes a thoughtful and passionate case for why parenthood is not the only path in life, taking our parent-centric, kid-fixated, baby-bump-patrolling culture to task in the process. What emerges is a more nuanced, diverse view of what it means to live a full, satisfying life.

    Reading aloud offers us a chance to be fully present with our children. It also increases our kids’ academic success, inspires compassion, and fortifies them with the inner strength they need to face life’s challenges. As Sarah Mackenzie has found with her own six children, reading aloud long after kids are able to read to themselves can deepen relationships in a powerful way.Founder of the immensely popular Read-Aloud Revival podcast, Sarah knows first-hand how reading can change a child’s life. In The Read-Aloud Family, she offers the inspiration and age-appropriate book lists you need to start a read-aloud movement in your own home. From a toddler’s wonder to a teenager’s resistance, Sarah details practical strategies to make reading aloud a meaningful family ritual. Reading aloud not only has the power to change a family—it has the power to change the world.

    Written to be read during the mind-bogglingly short breaks parents get during their busy days, these pieces will help moms find solace in a wide range of viewpoints and issues not often discussed in mainstream magazines and other parenting books. From dealing with rage to negotiating sleeping arrangements to the frustration and joy of parenting a special needs child, this is the perfect read for the hip but harried mother that says "you are still you."

    Now the video of that performance has been forwarded to mothers and daughters (and fathers and sons) all over the world. Originally written in 2007, "B" is a thank you note, a love letter, a wish, a promise, a confession, and a secret. With beautiful illustrations by Sophia Janowitz, "B" is finally available in this whimsical, magical book.

    "A virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad." --The New York Times Book Review"Riddled with insights into aging, womanhood, and discontent, Wayward is as elegant as it is raw, and almost as funny as it is sad." --Philadelphia Inquirer"A comic, vital new novel." --The New YorkerSamantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into the Mids -- that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life -- and her family -- as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams.Dana Spiotta's Wayward is a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female complexity in contemporary America. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird times, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.

    Her birth plan is explicit: she wants no fetal monitor, no IV, no epidural. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity ward—herself on the verge of showing—is patient with the young woman. She knows what it’s like to worry that something might go wrong, and she understands the pain when it does. She knows as well as anyone the severe challenge of childbirth, what it does to the mind and the body.Eleven Hours is the story of two soon-to-be mothers who, in the midst of a difficult labor, are forced to reckon with their pasts and re-create their futures. Lore must disentangle herself from a love triangle; Franckline must move beyond past traumas to accept the life that’s waiting for her. Pamela Erens moves seamlessly between their begrudging friendship and the memories evoked by so intense an experience. At turns urgent and lyrical, Erens’s novel is a visceral portrait of childbirth, and a vivid rendering of the way we approach motherhood—with fear and joy, anguish and awe.

    Her subject matter can be found climbing through the window, hanging on to the edge of the roof, and always at the refrigerator. Here she chronicles the exuberant, awesome life of boys through conversations overheard, rules she's been forced to make, and the many episodes of boy behavior that continue to mystify mothers worldwide. From the care and feeding of her team, to travels out in public, to their wide-eyed adoration of Walker, Texas Ranger, this laugh-out-loud celebration joyfully explores the sweet and wild side of boyhood.

    That’s right—and teen health expert Dr. Meg Meeker has the data and clinical experience to prove it. After more than twenty years of counseling girls, she knows that fathers, more than anyone else, set the course for their daughters’ lives. Now Dr. Meeker, author of the critically acclaimed Epidemic: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids, shows you how to strengthen—or rebuild—your bond with your daughter, and how to use it to shape her life, and yours, for the better. Directly challenging the feminist attack on traditional masculinity, Dr. Meeker demonstrates that the most important factor for girls growing up into confident, well-adjusted women is a strong father with conservative values. To have one, she shows, is the best protection against eating disorders, failure in school, STDs, unwed pregnancy, and drug or alcohol abuse—and the best predictor of academic achievement, successful marriage, and a satisfying emotional life. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters reveals: • The essential characteristics and virtues of strong fathers—and how to develop them • How daughters take cues from their fathers on everything from drug use, drinking, smoking, and having sex, to self-esteem, moodiness, and seeking attention from boys • Why girls want you to place restrictions on them (even though they’ll complain when you do) • How to become a hero to your daughter—and why she needs that more than anything • The one mistake fathers make that is the primary cause of girls "hooking up" • Why girls depend on the guidance of fathers through, and even beyond, their college years • Recipe for disaster: the notion that girls "need to make their own decisions andmistakes" • Why girls need God—and how your faith, or lack thereof, will influence her • How to communicate with your daughter—and how not to • True stories of "prodigal daughters"—and how their fathers helped bring them back Dads, you are far more powerful than you think you are. Your daughters need the support that only fathers can provide—and if you are willing to follow Dr. Meeker’s advice on how to guide your daughter, to stand between her and a toxic culture, your rewards will be unmatched

    Sociologist Orna Donath dispels the silence around this profoundly taboo subject in a powerful work that draws from her years of research interviewing women who wish they had never become mothers.Donath treats regret as a feminist issue: as regret marks the road not taken, we need to consider whether alternative paths for women may currently be blocked off. Donath asks that we pay attention to what is forbidden by our contemporary rules governing motherhood, time, and emotion, including the cultural assumption that motherhood is a “natural” role for women—for the sake of all women, not just those who regret becoming mothers. Donath finds that the women in her study became mothers for a wide variety of reasons: some did so to avoid divorce, exclusion from their family, or alienation from their friends; others did not think about it at all, but accepted it as the “next step” of what society considers to be a normal and natural life course. Others experienced regret despite initially having an strong desire to become mothers. Though they may love their children, these women each describe the agonizing guilt and suffering they have experienced as a result of becoming mothers, and consider the different ways they have each come to recognize and deal with these conflicts.

    Shefali Tsabary’s A Call to Conscious Parenting is that our children are born to us to create deep internal transformation within us.Our children have the power to unleash our egoic behavior unlike anyone else, triggering all of our emotional reactivity. As, through our intimate relationship with them, we are exposed to our immaturity, they become our most accurate mirror of our own lack of emotional development. In other words, by inviting us to confront who we are in our relationship with them, our children raise us to be the parents they long for us to become.Despite our best intentions to raise our children well, in our unconsciousness we pass on emotional legacies to our children that have deep and lasting repercussions. Bequeathing to them our unresolved needs, unmet expectations, and frustrated dreams, we shackle them in unconscious patterns that shut them down to their own unique being. To do justice to parenthood, a parent needs to become conscious. Only to the degree we are willing to transform our own emotional present do we succeed in positively influencing our children’s future.Dr. Tsabary asks us to set aside traditional parenting strategies that major in controlling our children and instead find true kinship with their spirits by tuning into who each child is in its own unique essence. Surrendering to the oneness of the parent-child relationship in this way lifts parenting out of the physical and into the realm of the sacred.Peppered with practical, hands-on examples from Dr. Tsabary’s real-life experiences with the countless families she has helped journey consciously together, A Call to Conscious Parenting is a manual for giving our children the opportunity to shine and dazzle with their natural state of being.

    An occasional chambermaid, granddaughter to a typesetter, and daughter to a dead man, awkward and brave, wayward and willful, she is in love (unrequited) with an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. What she does to ease the pain of growing up lands her in prison. What she does to get out is the stuff of legend. In the words of writer Michelle Tea, The Seas is "creepy and poetic, subversive and strangely funny, [and] a phenomenal piece of literature."

    Boyack Fun and practical, author Merrilee Boycak will have readers laughing out loud as well as feeling grateful for her parenting advice. She s a mom who s spent the last 22 years in the real-life work of parenting. "I have four sons, 13, 15, 17, and 22. You know what that means," she writes. "I m an absolute expert in raising children 23 and older." Merrilee offers the "LDS parenting owner s manual they forgot to give you" for training kids - from toddlers to teens - to be independent. It includes ideas for how to teach kids about money, investing, debt, and the importance of earning their own money; how to teach children to serve; how to help children with emotional and spiritual development; and much more.