Kids & Families

What do Vikings know about raising children? Turns out, quite a bit.

After a decade of living in Denmark, and raising her three kids there, Helen Russell noticed that Nordic kids (or mini-Vikings) are different from children raised in other parts of the world. They eat differently. They learn differently. They play, dress, and even sleep differently. They run, jump, climb, fall and get up again, out in nature, for hours a day. It's cold and wet and uncomfortable--often. But they cope. Even though the weather's terrible and it's dark October through March. And then they grow up to be some of the happiest adults on the planet. So her question was: how?

In The Danish Secret to Happy Kids, Russell dives deep into the parenting culture of Denmark and the other Nordic nations, from parental leave policies to school structure to screen time, uncovering surprising strategies and customs that lead to largely happy, well-adjusted humans over the long term. This fascinating peek behind the cultural curtain allows readers to marvel over infants comfortably sleeping outside in chilly temperatures, school-age kids wielding axes in the woods, and teenagers spending a year or two at efterskole, a special boarding school designed to prepare adolescents for independent life in the real world--a concept that is beginning to be adopted in other nations.

Refreshingly funny and unfailingly optimistic about the new generation of humans growing up in the world right now, The Danish Secret to Happy Kids is a heart-warming love letter to Russell's adopted homeland, a comforting armchair travel read, and proof that we could all use a bit more Viking in our everyday lives.

Many children are labelled 'different' - by doctors, psychologists, educators, or even peers- and as parents, this label can limit our hopes and expectations for them. Although the challenges that come with these labels are very real, and can be daunting, all of our children can be raised to be strong, capable, curious humans. 
This book brings together the 12 habits you need to set your child up for success regardless of diagnosis. Chapters range from defining what 'capable' means for your child and setting expectations for how others treat your child, to challenging your child in safe ways, and helping your child build a narrative of strength. With true stories that bring each habit to life, the neuroscience underpinning each habit, activities that encourage reflection and practical application, this is a game-changing guide to understanding, supporting and celebrating your extraordinary child.

The world is full of mixed messages for girls: Stand up for yourself but do it softly. Be independent but not single. Love your body, just make sure it’s waxed, bleached, and thin. And then there are the more overt hostilities: being talked over, paid less, touched without permission, and having politicians debate their right to bodily autonomy. Many parents find it simpler to affirm girls’ strength than to address these distressing experiences directly. But with girls’ skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide, parenting them in this culture presents an urgent challenge: How do we teach girls to recognize and cope with these realities without crushing their optimism and belief that they can incite change?

Jo-Ann Finkelstein, a Harvard-educated psychologist, has more than two decades of experience working with girls, helping them find resilience in the face of toxic messages about beauty, sex, and femininity. In Sexism & Sensibility, she draws on real stories from her practice to unpack the effects of sexism in its many guises. Going beyond girl power and full of smart, constructive ways to help girls make sense of things, it includes 

• how to talk about misogyny, gender stereotyping, objectification, and consent—at different ages
• strategies for fine-tuning our daughters’ natural “sexism detectors” and safeguarding their self-esteem 
• ways to help girls spot and contest the microaggressions they face in school, in the media, in relationships, and in public
• how to recognize and combat sexism in our own parenting

We can’t shield our daughters from gender bias and sexism, but we can make sure that they are more prepared to handle it than we ever were. Sexism & Sensibility is an eye-opening and essential resource for proactive parenting.

From potty-training expert and social worker Jamie Glowacki, who’s already helped over half a million families successfully toilet train their preschoolers, comes a newly revised and updated guide that’s “straight-up, parent-tested, and funny to boot” (Amber Dusick, author of Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures).

Worried about potty training? Let Jamie Glowacki, potty-training expert, show you how it’s done. Her six-step, proven process to get your toddler out of diapers and onto the toilet has already worked for tens of thousands of kids and their parents.

Here’s the good news: your child is probably ready to be potty trained EARLIER than you think (ideally, between 20–30 months), and it can be done FASTER than you expect (most kids get the basics in a few days—but Jamie’s got you covered even if it takes a little longer). If you’ve ever said to yourself:

-How do I know if my kid is ready?
-Why won’t my child poop in the potty?
-How do I avoid “potty power struggles”?
-How can I get their daycare provider on board?
-My kid was doing so well—why is he regressing?
-And what about nighttime?!

Oh Crap! Potty Training can solve all of these (and other) common issues. This isn’t theory, you’re not bribing with candy, and there are no gimmicks. This is real-world, from-the-trenches potty training information—all the questions and all the answers you need to do it once and be done with diapers for good.

Child development expert and author of How Toddlers Thrive, Dr. Tovah Klein gives parents the confidence they need to help children and teens build resilience and flourish in an unpredictable world.

Whether it's national or global events affecting our sense of safety or stressors in our day-to-day lives, we are constantly confronted with situations that threaten the wellbeing of our children. Thankfully, there is good news that has not yet been reflected in the headlines: we can mitigate the effect of such rampant uncertainty by guiding our children to manage adversity and become more resilient. The key is parental involvement.

Raising Resilience is a lifeline for every family contending with life's many stresses and traumas--from the most commonplace to the most devastating--including peer conflicts, divorce, family tensions, death, moving, academic struggles, and larger personal and national events. Through her years of experience and ongoing research, developmental psychologist Dr. Tovah Klein offers parents and caregivers five specific resources that children can develop, enabling them to face adversity, adjust, and thrive where they might otherwise falter or break down under pressure.

Dr. Klein has devoted her professional life to helping children flourish by supporting them to build the inner tools to deal with devastating events and everyday stressors. Using clinical data and building on evidence-based interventions to offset and heal from traumatic events, she shares a five-point plan with actionable strategies, illustrative stories, and conversation prompts so parents can guide their children to become resourceful, adaptive, and able to grow and flourish now and into the future.

Wise and hopeful, this essential guide empowers parents and caregivers with practical guidance for instilling in their children the emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and social know-how they need to manage life's challenges and create a lasting capacity for meaningful, happy lives. Accessible, compassionate, and authoritative, Raising Resilience is a timely resource that shows parents how they can confidently build strong relationships with their children and raise them to be motivated, self-assured, and kind--all of which are qualities desperately needed in our ever-changing world.

Combining painfully honest memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment.

“Rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters. Trying to raise good sons suddenly felt like a hopeless task.”
  
As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been politicized from all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman finds herself conflicted and scared. While the right pushes a dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, her feminist peers often dismiss boys as little more than entitled predators-in-waiting.  Meanwhile her home life feels like a daily confrontation with the triumph of nature over nurture. 
  
With young men in the grip of a loneliness epidemic and dying by suicide at a rate of nearly four times their female peers, Whippman asks: How do we raise our sons to have a healthy sense of self without turning them into privileged assholes? How can we find a feminism that holds boys to a higher standard but still treats them with empathy? And what do we do when our boys won’t cooperate with our plans?
 
Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures boys now face; and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and adrift. Feminist gonzo-style, she spends months interviewing incels, reports on a conference for boys accused of sexual assault; crashes at a residential therapy center for young men in Utah, talks to a wide range of psychologists and other experts, and gets boys of all backgrounds to open up about sex, consent, porn, body image, mental health, cancel culture, screens, friendship and loneliness. Along the way, she finds her simple certainties about male privilege seriously challenged.
  
With wit, honesty, and a refusal to settle for easy answers, BoyMom charts a new path to give boys a healthier, more expansive, and fulfilling story about their own lives.

No more arguing, punishments, or bribes. Help your child get motivated--and watch them soar!

You're at your wits' end. Again. Your teen is bright, savvy, and capable--and completely unmotivated. Whether it's too much screen time, pandemic-induced resignation, or disillusionment at the state of the world, so many kids recently seem to have lost the passion to create, excel, engage, and do. What you need, for them and you, is a teen expert--a fresh voice to ask the right questions, make powerful suggestions, and offer proven techniques for getting your teen back in the game and focused on a future of fulfillment, success, purpose, and enjoyment.

Melanie McNally is that expert, and she'll help you and your teen conquer whatever's been keeping them down and holding them back. Presented in simple steps, this book breaks down the three major components of motivation:

• Help your teen ignite their creativity and passion
• Work with your teen to increase their endurance and effort
• Encourage your teen to envision and set worthy and attainable milestones

Small changes can have huge impacts--the kind that inspire confidence, a sense of accomplishment, and the desire to keep going, keep doing, and stay the course. If you're looking to motivate your teen and set the stage for success and happiness, this book can help you get started today.

A guide to help you find the right therapy program for your child

• Explores many non-medication therapy methods, such as Sensory Integration Therapy and CranioSacral Therapy, to help children with sensory processing disorders and other developmental glitches

• Details common signs of SPD at each developmental stage from infancy to grade school

• Presents success stories from the author’s own family and from her sensory integration therapy clinic

Every person—whether baby, child, teenager, or adult—interacts with the world in their own unique way. Yet some have a harder time than others due to a variety of sensory processing issues, which can lead to motor delays, learning differences, frustration, anxiety, and emotional, behavioral, and social challenges as well as diagnoses like ADHD and “autism spectrum.” As sensory integration expert Sally Fryer Dietz reveals, these children are not “broken.” 

Speaking from both her decades of professional experience as well as her own journey to help her oldest son, Dietz shares in-depth guidance to help you find the right therapeutic support for your child. Detailing common red flags at each developmental stage, from infancy to grade school, she explains how children with sensory processing “glitches” are often misunderstood and put on medication rather than in therapies that can help them succeed naturally. Sharing how difficult it was to hear from her son’s teachers that he was having more challenges in school than his peers, she presents success stories from her family and from her sensory integration therapy clinic. She outlines therapies and treatments for body and mind that can help improve your child’s sensory motor development and function, such as sensory integration-based occupational, physical, and CranioSacral therapy. 

No matter where your child is on the spectrum of sensory motor integration, this guide showcases effective solutions beyond medication and can help you figure out what options are available to help children grow into happy and productive adults.

A practical guide to involving babies and children in all sorts of adventures, whether it be cycling, camping, paddling, hiking, swimming or outdoor holidays.

As soon as Bex Band, founder of the UK's largest women's adventure community, Love Her Wild, announced she was pregnant with her first child, the sympathy began. 'Enjoy your adventures while you can', 'It's going to be a big shock not being able to travel as much', and 'Aren't you going to miss adventuring?'It seemed as though having children was a death sentence when you're an outdoor adventurer. 

But it really doesn't have to be that way. Yes, it's a scary prospect – how do you keep them safe? Where do they sleep? What equipment do you need? - but it's totally doable.

When Bex's daughter was just a few weeks old, Bex and her husband took her camping. Now age 2, she's been wild camping on Dartmoor, cycling along the coast, swimming in rural lakes and even carried in a backpack on a multi-day Negev desert hike. Now, she shares her stories and insights in Family Adventures, a practical and inspirational guide to involving babies and children in outdoor adventures. 

This guide is full of useful information (such as what to pack when camping with an infant or how to keep children safe in open water), invaluable tips (family games you can play around a campfire or how to keep morale up in bad weather) and plenty of honesty around things going wrong (poo-explosion on a wild camp, anyone?). Experiences from adventuring families also provide a plethora of insights so that you're well equipped to make your family adventuring dreams a reality.

An indispensable handbook on all aspects of fatherhood during the first 12 months, by the author of The Expectant Father.

The essential handbook for all things first-year father is now fully updated and revised. Not only will new dads get a month-by-month guide to their baby's development, men reading The New Father will learn how they change, grow, and develop over the first twelve months of fatherhood.

In each chapter, Brott focuses on What's Going On with the Baby; What You're Going Through; What's Going On with Your Partner; You and Your Baby; Family Matters; and more. The latest research, as well as time-honored wisdom--and humor, thanks to New Yorker cartoons and Brott's light touch--make The New Father indispensable for the modern father who doesn't want to miss a moment of his child's first year.

What's new?
* How technology is changing fatherhood
* Changing definitions of fatherhood
* Changes in the way society deals with dads--from changing tables in public men's rooms to workplace flexibility
* Research proving that a father's love is just as important as a mother's
* How being an involved dad rewires a man's brain
* How changes in women's roles in the family affect dads and their roles
* Special concerns for: young dads, older dads, at-home dads, unmarried dads, dads in same-sex couples, dads in blended families, dads of kids with special needs, and men who became dads with the help of technology
* The special impact dads have on girls and boys
* Specific strategies dads can use to get--and stay--involved in their children's lives
* Updated resources for new fathers

Not to mention new research and information on:
* How to understand what your baby is telling you
* Babies' amazing abilities
* Baby massage--they love it!
* The latest on vaccinations and healthcare
* And much, much more