Child Development

Angie, 6, and sister Polly, 4, are utterly distraught when they arrive to stay with foster carer Cathy Glass. Their older half-sister Ashleigh has accused their father of rape, and the two young sisters have been removed from home to keep them safe. Cathy tries to comfort the girls, but they are inconsolable. They just want their mummy and daddy, who they love dearly. The girls appear to have been well looked after, but as they settle and start to talk of life at home, it becomes clear something is badly wrong.

It is estimated that as many as 34 million people grew up in alcoholic homes. But what about the rest of us? What about families that had no alcoholism, but did have perfectionism, workaholism, compulsive overeating, intimacy problems, depression, problems in expressing feelings, plus all the other personality traits that can produce a family system much like an alcoholic one? Countless millions of us struggle with these kinds of dysfunctions every day, and until very recently we struggled alone.

The detailed personality readings Human Design provides empower people to make decisions, choose professions, and create relationships with ease and success because they are no longer struggling against innate strengths and weaknesses. They are instead tapping into their personal power and destiny. Understanding these readings allows people to align their actions with their inherent, truest self.

With Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters, Susan Forward, Ph.D., author of the smash #1 best-seller Toxic Parents, offers a powerful look at the devastating impact unloving mothers have on their daughters - and provides clear, effective techniques for overcoming that painful legacy.

Tilly hates her stepfather, Dave. He abuses her mother, but she refuses to leave him. Frightened for her own safety, Tilly asks to go into foster care and is placed with Cathy. Tilly arrives with a graze on her cheek, and Cathy becomes increasingly concerned by Dave’s behaviour, especially when she learns he has been showering Tilly with gifts. While she’s busy looking after Tilly and trying to keep her safe, Cathy is also worried about her own daughter, Lucy.

In Dr. Mark McConville's decades of experience as a family clinical psychologist, perhaps no problem has been more fraught than that of young adults who fail to successfully transition from adolescence into adulthood. These kids - technically adults - just can't get it together: They can't hold a job, they struggle to develop meaningful relationships, and they often end up back in their parents' spare bedroom or on the couch. In fact, studies show that one in four Americans aged 25 to 34 neither work nor attend school - a problem that spans all socioeconomic and geographic boundaries.

The emotional trauma we suffer as children not only shapes our emotional lives as adults but also affects our physical health and overall well-being. Scientists now know on a biochemical level exactly how parents' chronic fights, divorce, death in the family, being bullied or hazed, and growing up with a hypercritical, alcoholic, or mentally ill parent can leave permanent, physical "fingerprints" on our brains.

Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to only a handful of people, is a harsh and lonely place. So when James Campbell's cousin Heimo Korth asked him to spend a summer building a cabin in the rugged Interior, Campbell hesitated about inviting his 15-year-old daughter, Aidan, to join him. Would she be able to withstand clouds of mosquitoes, the threat of grizzlies, bathing in an ice-cold river, and hours of grueling labor peeling and hauling logs? But once there, Aidan embraced the wild.

We can only anchor, nurture, nourish and instill confidence in our children when we extend the same support to ourselves. After all, how can we effectively tend to our children's needs when our energy reserves are depleted? There are a thousand and one ways to parent, and only one way that's authentic for you. Drawing on her work as a psychotherapist, alongside her own experiences as a mother, Anna shows that caring with our children begins with caring for ourselves, and it's time to replace exhaustion with empowerment.

A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children (2007), the quintessential compendium of raising gifted children, has been revised! In this new edition, coauthors Edward R. Amend Psy.D., Emily Kircher-Morris, LPC, and Janet Gore, M.Ed. reinforce the reliable approaches originally explored in the first edition, while drawing extensively on the wealth of research and information developed over the last 15 years in the areas of neuroscience, psychology, and education.

Rex Forehand, PhD, and Nicholas Long, PhD, have helped thousands of parents achieve discipline using positive reinforcement, without yelling or harming the child's self-esteem. Their clinically proven, five-week program gives you the tools you need to successfully manage your child's behavior, giving specific factors that cause or contribute to disruptive behavior, ways to develop a more positive atmosphere in your family and home, and strategies for managing specific behavior problems.

No parent experienced their teen years the way that children do today. This guide provides strategies and tips for actively learning the world of our children.

Parenting is tough especially when anger takes over. Maybe you never planned to yell so much, but the stress, the defiance, and the sheer exhaustion have you snapping more than you'd like. The guilt is real. The fear of what your child's future might look like if things don’t change is even worse. I get it. You love your child, but sometimes their anger and yours feels impossible to control. Maybe you're stuck in a cycle of explosive reactions, punishments that don’t work, and apologies that don’t stick. You’re not alone. The good news? There is a way out.

In The Family Firm, Brown professor of economics and mom of two Emily Oster offers a classic business school framework for data-driven parents to think more deliberately about the key issues of the elementary years: school, health, extracurricular activities, and more. Unlike the hourly challenges of infant parenting, the big questions in this age come up less frequently.

A brilliant and utterly original thinker, Andrew Solomon's journey began from his experience of being the gay child of straight parents. He wondered how other families accommodate children who have a variety of differences: families of people who are deaf, who are dwarfs, who have Down syndrome, who have autism, who have schizophrenia, who have multiple severe disabilities, who are prodigies, who commit crimes, who are transgender.

Why America's sons are underachieving, and what we can do about it. Something is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, American boys are, on average, less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere 20 years ago. The gender gap in college attendance and graduation rates has widened dramatically. In Boys Adrift, Dr. Leonard Sax delves into the scientific literature and draws on more than 20 years of clinical experience to explain why boys and young men are failing in school and disengaged at home.

Following deaths, divorces, or the confusion of major relocation, many adults tell their children “don’t feel bad”. In fact, say the authors of the highly praised The Grief Recovery Handbook, feeling bad or sad is precisely the appropriate emotion attached to sad events. Encouraging a child to bypass grief without completion can cause unseen long-term damage.

Do you have a child with oppositional defiant disorder and have no idea how to deal with him or her? Do your child’s defiance and aggression exhaust you and make you angry or worried? If so, this is the audiobook for you.

As pediatrician and mother of two teenagers Cara Natterson explains, puberty starts in boys long before any visible signs appear, and that causes confusion about their changing temperaments for boys and parents alike. Often, they also grow quieter as they grow taller, which leads to less parent-child communication. But, as Natterson warns in Decoding Boys, we respect their increasing "need" for privacy, monosyllabic conversations, and alone time at their peril.

At the heart of this groundbreaking book are two urgent questions: What do our young children need in the earliest years of school, and how do we ensure that they all get it? Cutting-edge research has proven that early childhood education is crucial for all children to gain the academic and emotional skills they need to succeed later in life. Children who attend quality pre-K programs have a host of positive outcomes including better language, literacy, problem solving, and math skills down the line.