Kids Development

Some 75% of American families want their kids to play sports. Athletics are training grounds for character, friendship, and connection; at their best, sports insulate kids from hardship and prepare them for adult life. But youth sports have changed so dramatically over the last 25 years that they no longer deliver the healthy outcomes everyone wants. Instead, unbeknownst to most parents, kids who play competitive organized sports are more likely to burn out or suffer from overuse injuries than to develop their characters or build healthy habits. What happened to kids' sports?

Our children can be our greatest teachers. Parenting expert Susan Stiffelman writes that the very behaviors that push our buttons - refusing to cooperate or ignoring our requests - can help us build awareness and shed old patterns, allowing us to raise our children with greater ease and enjoyment.

Can you teach your child to be kind? This vital question is taking on a new urgency as our culture grows ever more abrasive and divided. A world-renowned developmental psychologist, Dr. Thomas Lickona has lead the character education movement in schools for 40 years and now he shares with parents the vital tools they need to create a culture of kindness at home. Kindness doesn’t stand on its own. It needs a supporting cast of other essential virtues - like self-control, good judgment, courage, and gratitude.

Empower your child with the essential life skills they need to succeed with this comprehensive bundle of three books: Active Confidence for Kids, Active Empathy for Kids, and Active Focus for Kids.

An Avid Reader Press book. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every listener.

So When Are You Having Kids? is not your parents’ parenting book, nor is it a how-to for getting pregnant. It’s a nonjudgmental, inclusive guidebook for women, men, gender-nonconforming people, same-sex couples, and prospective single parents who want to make an informed decision regarding if and how they bring children into the world. Combining research with over 100 compelling real-life stories, the resources in this book are as diverse as the generations they’re meant to serve.

In Why Have Kids?, Valenti explores these controversial questions through on-the-ground reporting, startling new research, and her own unique experiences as a mom. She moves beyond the black and white “mommy wars” over natural parenting, discipline, and work-life balance to explore a more nuanced reality: one filled with ambivalence, joy, guilt, and exhaustion. Would-be parents must navigate the decision to have children amidst a daunting combination of cultural expectations and hard facts.

Our preteen years, ages nine to 13, can present some of the most difficult times in our young lives, a period of tremendous physical and emotional change. We're eager to leave the "kid" stage, yet we're uncertain about what adolescence will bring; we start hearing the familiar refrain "wait until you're older" far too often. Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul is a companion guide for these transitional years.

Healthy Arms, Healthy Kids is a comprehensive guidebook that provides parents and caregivers with practical tips and advice for preventing arm injuries in children between the ages of 6-12.

From America's leading experts on parent-child communication, authors of How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk and Siblings Without Rivalry, comes a breakthrough guide telling parents and techers how to handle one of the burning issues of our day: how to motivate kids to succeed in school at a time when schools are rife with violence and many students are openly rebellious.

Give Your Child the Tools to Thrive—And Get the Support You’ve Been Searching For Does your child struggle with focus, meltdowns, or managing big emotions? This therapist-approved 10-in-1 bundle offers practical strategies to build emotional intelligence and executive functioning skills. What’s Inside the 10-in-1 Bundle: Part 1: Executive Functioning Workbook (5-in-1) 5-minute activities to boost focus, follow-through, and organization. Part 2: Emotional Regulation Workbook (5-in-1) Tools to help children calm down, manage anxiety, and feel in control.

Some of the best philosophers in the world gather in surprising places—preschools and playgrounds. They debate questions about metaphysics and morality, even though they’ve never heard those words and can’t tie their shoes. They’re kids. And as University of Michigan professor of philosophy and law Scott Hershovitz shows, they can help grown-ups solve some of life’s greatest mysteries.

Children aren’t being taught nonverbal skills in the same formalized way they are taught reading and writing. Instead, they are expected to simply absorb these skills at school, home, and on the playground. But between the steep rise in screen time and the social leaning lost to Covid quarantines and school closures, many kids haven’t had sufficient opportunity to learn all the rules of nonverbal behavior.

From the moment you discovered you were going to be a mom, you envisioned spending each day with your kids, guiding, teaching, and loving them. But diapers, wipes, shoes, and braces are expensive. Though it may feel impossible to manage on one income, author Erin Odom of The Humbled Homemakerblog is here to tell you that, through God's grace, staying at home with your kids isn't just doable; it's doable while living the good life. Erin shares 100 tips, tricks, and simple ways that she has provided the good life on a budget for her family, and you can do the same.

Kids, a Primer is a collection of a grandfather's musings on the way his (now grown) children are raising their children and being glad about being a grandparent rather than a new parent with young children (again). While Ungar is convinced that grandparents could do a better job raising children if they had the energy, he is grateful that he, in fact, no longer has the energy.

This book, How to Talk to Kids So Kids Will Listen, is for those that find communicating with children frustrating and stressful. Parenting can be rewarding and joyous in so many different ways, however, it can also be exasperating and trying, especially when striving to ensure our kids listen when being communicated to.

Kelly Oriard and Callie Christensen, early childhood experts and founders of the Slumberkins brand of characters supporting emotional learning, provide accessible products and tools for empowering kids to build lifelong emotional intelligence. Written for parents and caregivers, All Feelings Welcome helps you support children in noticing, naming, and welcoming all feelings through the everyday parenting moments and in the more challenging times when you and your child need support.

Parent–child conflicts in some households revolve around technology. Children demand more screen time and parents lack strategies to know how to intervene, leaving them feeling guilty and powerless. But it doesn't have to be this way. In Breaking Kids Free From Screen Addiction, Richard Bass, a seasoned educator with a wealth of experience in childhood disabilities and mental health disorders, offers modern parenting advice and solutions on how to understand and combat the effects of excessive screen time for children of all age groups.

The contributors of Trust Kids! write from different backgrounds, genders, ages, and sexualities and combine past lineages with more recent child-rearing ideas to offer a fresh, inspiring perspective. Many works on parenting and families wind up re-inscribing hierarchies by declaring how kids should be liberated. Trust Kids! insists on youth autonomy, listening to youth, and questioning adult supremacy.

Our culture tells parents there's one best way to raise kids: enroll them in a dozen activities, protect them from trauma, and get them into the most expensive college you can. If you can't do that, don't bother. How is that going? Record rates of anxiety, depression, medication, debts, loneliness and more. In Family Unfriendly, bestselling author and Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney says it's time to end this failed experiment in overparenting.