Pollack challenges conventional expectations about manhood and masculinity that encourage parents to treat boys as little men, raising them through a toughening process that drives their true emotions underground. Only when we understand what boys are really like, says Pollack, can we help them develop more self-confidence and the emotional savvy they need to deal with issues such as depression, love and sexuality, drugs and alcohol, divorce, and violence.

    Michelle Anthony and Dr. Reyna Lindert began noticing an alarming pattern of social struggle among girls as young as five, including their own daughters. In today's world, it is likely that your daughter has been faced with bullying and friendship issues, too---and perhaps you're at a loss for how to guide her through these situations effectively. Little Girls Can Be Mean is the first book to tackle the unique social struggles of elementary-aged girls, giving you the tools you need to help your daughter become stronger, happier, and better able to enjoy her friendships at school and beyond.Dr. Anthony and Dr. Lindert offer an easy-to-follow, 4-step plan to help you become a problem-solving partner with your child, including tips and insights that girls can use on their own to confront social difficulties in an empowered way. Whether your daughter is just starting grade school or is already on her way to junior high, you'll learn how to:OBSERVE the social situation with new eyesCONNECT with your child in a new wayGUIDE your child with simple, compassionate strategiesSUPPORT your daughter to act more independently to face the social issueBy focusing squarely on the issues and needs of girls in the years before adolescence, Little Girls Can Be Mean is the essential, go-to guide for any parent or educator of girls in grades K-6.

    Wiseman showed how girls of every background are profoundly influenced by their interactions with one another. Now, Wiseman has revised and updated her groundbreaking book for a new generation of girls and explores:•How girls’ experiences before adolescence impact their teen years, future relationships, and overall success•The different roles girls play in and outside of cliques as Queen Bees, Targets, and Bystanders, and how this defines how they and others are treated•Girls’ power plays–from fake apologies to fights over IM and text messages •Where boys fit into the equation of girl conflicts and how you can help your daughter better hold her own with the opposite sex•Checking your baggage–recognizing how your experiences impact the way you parent, and how to be sanely involved in your daughter’s difficult, yet common social conflictsPacked with insights about technology’s impact on Girl World and enlivened with the experiences of girls, boys, and parents, the book that inspired the hit movie Mean Girls offers concrete strategies to help you empower your daughter to be socially competent and treat herself with dignity.

    But the rest of us wish that parenting came with operating instructions. Now it does. The result of thirty years of scientific research, Alan Kazdin’s The Everyday Parenting Toolkit will guide you through every developmental stage—from toddler to teenager—and make you a more relaxed, confident, and competent parent. The rigorously tested strategies in this book will not only help change your child’s behavior, they will also decrease the stress in family relations, increase your joy in parenting, and help build a more nurturing home life that can directly improve children's mental and physical health and school success. You won’t find abstract philosophy here. You’ll see every point, every strategy, illustrated with real-life examples. From toilet training to teaching a child to accept “no” without a tantrum all the way up to struggles over cellphones and curfew; from swiftly and gently correcting problem behaviors to fostering positive character qualities like respect for others, honesty, good friendships, or altruism, The Everyday Parenting Toolkit will surprise you time and again with counterintuitive advice that works. For years parents have been coming to Dr. Kazdin’s Parenting Center at Yale University for help with the challenges, large and small, of child rearing. With the publication of this book, every reader can gain access to that advice and to parenting know-how that transforms families.

    And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. Preeminent author and researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over thirty years. Long an enthusiast for its possibilities, here she investigates a troubling consequence: at work, at home, in politics, and in love, we find ways around conversation, tempted by the possibilities of a text or an email in which we don’t have to look, listen, or reveal ourselves. We develop a taste for what mere connection offers. The dinner table falls silent as children compete with phones for their parents’ attention. Friends learn strategies to keep conversations going when only a few people are looking up from their phones. At work, we retreat to our screens although it is conversation at the water cooler that increases not only productivity but commitment to work. Online, we only want to share opinions that our followers will agree with – a politics that shies away from the real conflicts and solutions of the public square. The case for conversation begins with the necessary conversations of solitude and self-reflection. They are endangered: these days, always connected, we see loneliness as a problem that technology should solve. Afraid of being alone, we rely on other people to give us a sense of ourselves, and our capacity for empathy and relationship suffers. We see the costs of the flight from conversation everywhere: conversation is the cornerstone for democracy and in business it is good for the bottom line. In the private sphere, it builds empathy, friendship, love, learning, and productivity. But there is good news: we are resilient. Conversation cures. Based on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools, and the workplace, Turkle argues that we have come to a better understanding of where our technology can and cannot take us and that the time is right to reclaim conversation. The most human—and humanizing—thing that we do. The virtues of person-to-person conversation are timeless, and our most basic technology, talk, responds to our modern challenges. We have everything we need to start, we have each other.

    presents this definitive and newly updated guide to divorce and making shared custody work for parents and children.The ground-breaking classic, Mom’s House, Dad’s House, has become the standard for two generations of divorcing parents, and includes examples, self-tests, checklists, tools, and guidelines to help separated moms and dads with the legal, emotional, and financial issues they will encounter as they work to create happy and stable homes. This comprehensive guide looks anew at the needs of all family members with creative options and common-sense advice, including: * The map to a “decent divorce” and two happy homes * Helping children of divorce with age-specific advice * Negotiating Parental Agreements and custody arrangements * Breaking away from “negative intimacy” with a difficult ex-husband or ex-wife * Sidestepping destructive myths about divorce (and marriage) * Handling long-distance parenting and parenting alone With Mom’s House, Dad’s House, parents will learn how to help their children heal and find a sense of continuity, security, and stability throughout the divorce process and in any custody situation.

    We call this imprisonment schooling, yet wonder why kids become bored and misbehave. Even outside of school children today seldom play and explore without adult supervision, and are afforded few opportunities to control their own lives. The result: anxious, unfocused children who see schooling—and life—as a series of hoops to struggle through.In Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that our children, if free to pursue their own interests through play, will not only learn all they need to know, but will do so with energy and passion. Children come into this world burning to learn, equipped with the curiosity, playfulness, and sociability to direct their own education. Yet we have squelched such instincts in a school model originally developed to indoctrinate, not to promote intellectual growth.To foster children who will thrive in today’s constantly changing world, we must entrust them to steer their own learning and development. Drawing on evidence from anthropology, psychology, and history, Gray demonstrates that free play is the primary means by which children learn to control their lives, solve problems, get along with peers, and become emotionally resilient. This capacity to learn through play evolved long ago, in hunter-gatherer bands where children acquired the skills of the culture through their own initiatives. And these instincts still operate remarkably well today, as studies at alternative, democratically administered schools show. When children are in charge of their own education, they learn better—and at lower cost than the traditional model of coercive schooling.A brave, counterintuitive proposal for freeing our children from the shackles of the curiosity-killing institution we call school, Free to Learn suggests that it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with our children, and start asking what’s wrong with the system. It shows how we can act—both as parents and as members of society—to improve children’s lives and promote their happiness and learning.

    Today’s kids have adopted sedentary lifestyles filled with television, video games, and computer screens. But more and more, studies show that children need “rough and tumble” outdoor play in order to develop their sensory, motor, and executive functions. Disturbingly, a lack of movement has been shown to lead to a number of health and cognitive difficulties, such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), emotion regulation and sensory processing issues, and aggressiveness at school recess break. So, how can you ensure your child is fully engaging their body, mind, and all of their senses? Using the same philosophy that lies at the heart of her popular TimberNook program—that nature is the ultimate sensory experience, and that psychological and physical health improves for children when they spend time outside on a regular basis—author Angela Hanscom offers several strategies to help your child thrive, even if you live in an urban environment. Today it is rare to find children rolling down hills, climbing trees, or spinning in circles just for fun. We’ve taken away merry-go-rounds, shortened the length of swings, and done away with teeter-totters to keep children safe. Children have fewer opportunities for unstructured outdoor play than ever before, and recess times at school are shrinking due to demanding educational environments. With this book, you’ll discover little things you can do anytime, anywhere to help your kids achieve the movement they need to be happy and healthy in mind, body, and spirit.

    Bored and Brilliant builds on that experiment to show us how to rethink our gadget use to live better and smarter in this new digital ecosystem. Manoush explains the connection between boredom and original thinking, exploring how we can harness boredom’s hidden benefits to become our most productive and creative selves without totally abandoning our gadgets in the process.Grounding the book in the neuroscience and cognitive psychology of “mind wandering”—what our brains do when we’re doing nothing at all—Manoush includes practical steps you can take to ease the nonstop busyness and enhance your ability to dream, wonder, and gain clarity in your work and life. The outcome is mind-blowing. Unplug and read on.

    Part intellectual journey, part memoir, Hamlet's BlackBerry sets out to solve what William Powers calls the conundrum of connectedness. Our computers and mobile devices do wonderful things for us. But they also impose an enormous burden, making it harder for us to focus, do our best work, build strong relationships, and find the depth and fulfillment we crave.Hamlet's BlackBerry argues that we need a new way of thinking, an everyday philosophy for life with screens. To find it, Powers reaches into the past, uncovering a rich trove of ideas that have helped people manage and enjoy their connected lives for thousands of years. New technologies have always brought the mix of excitement and stress that we feel today. Drawing on some of history's most brilliant thinkers, from Plato to Shakespeare to Thoreau, he shows that digital connectedness serves us best when it's balanced by its opposite, disconnectedness.Using his own life as laboratory and object lesson, Powers demonstrates why this is the moment to revisit our relationship to screens and mobile technologies, and how profound the rewards of doing so can be. Lively, original, and entertaining, Hamlet's BlackBerry will challenge you to rethink your digital life.

    Proven, practical advice for treating and preventing potty problems.

    Practical commonsense answers and real life examples, logical and realistic strategies, and innovative behaviour modification tools that work in the real world - all from a parent and family therapist who's seen almost everything there is to see and offers some hard-won battlefield wisdom. Written in down-to-earth language, this book needs to be handed out at birth, an essential guide for the struggling parent who knows family life can and should be better. Clinical psychologist, bestselling author, and father of two, Nigel Latta specializes in working with children with behavioural problems, from simple to severe. A regular media commentator and presenter, he has had three television series adapted from his books - BEYOND tHE DARKLANDS, tHE POLItICALLY INCORRECt PARENtING SHOW and tHE POLItICALLY INCORRECt GUIDE tO tEENAGERS (all of which screen in New Zealand and Australia) - and has had a regular parenting segment on National Radio.

    Tamar Chansky frequently counsels children (and their parents) whose negative thinking creates chronic or occasional emotional hurdles and impedes optimism, flexibility, and happiness. Now, in the first book that specifically focuses on negative thinking in kids, Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking provides parents, caregivers, and clinicians the same clear, concise, and compassionate guidance that Dr. Chansky employed in her previous guides to relieving children from anxiety and obsessive compulsive symptoms. Here she thoroughly covers the underlying causes of children's negative attitudes, as well as providing multiple strategies for managing negative thoughts, building optimism, and establishing emotional resilience.

    The children who heard more words were better prepared when they entered school. These same kids, when followed into third grade, had bigger vocabularies, were stronger readers, and got higher test scores. This disparity in learning is referred to as the achievement gap.Professor Dana Suskind, MD, learned of this thirty million word gap in the course of her work as a cochlear implant surgeon at University of Chicago Medical School and began a new research program along with her sister-in-law, Beth Suskind, to find the best ways to bridge that gap. The Thirty Million Word Initiative has developed programs for parents to show the kind of parent-child communication that enables optimal neural development and has tested the programs in and around Chicago across demographic groups. They boil down to getting parents to follow the three Ts: Tune in to what your child is doing; Talk more to your child using lots of descriptive words; and Take turns with your child as you engage in conversation. Parents are shown how to make the words they serve up more enriching. For example, instead of telling a child, “Put your shoes on,” one might say instead, “It is time to go out. What do we have to do?” The lab's new five-year longitudinal research program has just received funding so they can further corroborate their results. The neuroscience of brain plasticity is some of the most valuable and revolutionary medical science being done today. It enables us to think and do better. It is making a difference in the lives of both the old and young.  If you care for children, this landmark book is essential reading.

    Tears that seem to come out of nowhere. Battles over homework that are more like wars. When your child has problems regulating his or her emotions, there's no hiding it. Children with intense emotions go from 0 to 100 in seconds and are prone to frequent emotional and behavioral outbursts that leave parents feeling bewildered and helpless.Other parents may have told you that it's just a phase or that your child needs discipline. In reality, your child may have emotion dysregulation, a tendency to react intensely to situations other children take in stride. Parenting a Child Who Has Intense Emotions is an effective guide to de-escalating your child's emotions and helping your child express feelings in productive ways. You'll learn strategies drawn from dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), including mindfulness and validation skills, and practice them when your child's emotions spin out of control. This well-researched method for managing emotions can help your child make dramatic emotional and behavioral changes that both of you will be proud of.