New Motherhood

The first 40 days after the birth of a child offer an essential and fleeting period of rest and recovery for the new mother. Based on author Heng Ou's own postpartum experience with zuo yuezi, a set period of “confinement”, in which a woman remains at home focusing on healing and bonding with her baby, The First Forty Days revives the lost art of caring for the mother after birth.

Becoming a mother is a joyful rite of passage, but it can also be overwhelming - physically and emotionally. How can you calm the worries, quiet the guilt, and be present with yourself and your kids? Psychologist and mom Ilyse Dobrow DiMarco specializes in the myriad issues that women with young children struggle with. In this compassionate guide, she shares science-based strategies to help you cope with common challenges and make peace with your transformed identity.

In refreshingly honest, hilarious, and raw conversation, Amanda takes you through her clumsy journey into motherhood and shares how she learned to embrace her new self—stretch marks, rolls, and all. With journal prompts, exercises, and “Tice Advice,” Amanda helps you understand what really takes place postpartum—mentally and physically.

If you are struggling to cope with the anxieties of being a new mother, this is the book you need!

Six months after the birth of her son, Emma Jane Unsworth finds herself in the eye of a storm. Nothing - from pregnancy to birth and beyond - has gone as she expected. A birth plan? It might as well have been a rough draft! Furious and exhausted, her life is the complete opposite of what it used to be. She's swapped all night benders for a grazed labia and Whac-a-Moling haemorrhoids. How did she end up here? In this brave and hilarious account of postnatal depression, Emma tells her story of despair and recovery.

Everyone knows how babies are made, but scientists are only just beginning to understand the making of a mother. Mom Genes reveals the hard science behind our tenderest maternal impulses, tackling questions such as why mothers are destined to mimic their own moms (or not), how maternal aggression makes females the world’s most formidable creatures, and how a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic can make or break a mom.

Rachael Elmore has been there and knows on a personal and professional level how hard the early days and months of motherhood can be. In A Mom Is Born she takes her expertise as a licensed and clinical counselor and pairs it with her deeply personal story of overcoming postpartum depression after the birth of her first son. She comes alongside listeners with practical tools—such as the New Mom Wellness Plan and a postpartum progress checklist—to help find the balance between taking care of their new baby and taking care of themselves.

After the birth of her baby triggers a manic maelstrom, Dyane Harwood struggles to survive the bewildering highs and crippling lows of her brain's turmoil. Birth of a New Brain vividly depicts her postpartum bipolar disorder, an unusual type of bipolar disorder and postpartum mood and anxiety disorder. During her childhood, Harwood grew up close to her father, a brilliant violinist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic who had bipolar disorder. She learned how bipolar disorder could ravage a family, but she never suspected that she'd become mentally ill - until her baby was born.

Chrissie is eight and she has a secret: she has just killed a boy. The feeling made her belly fizz like soda pop. Her playmates are tearful and their mothers are terrified, keeping them locked indoors. But Chrissie rules the roost - she's the best at wall-walking, she knows how to get free candy, and now she has a feeling of power that she never gets at home, where food is scarce and attention scarcer.

This book is a bundle of two books, one focusing on sleep training and the other one focusing on gentle discipline. Each book presents a set of powerful and efficient techniques, and ends with positive self-affirmations that will empower both parents and kids and help them along the way.

Mindful Mamma is a reassuring and practical guide to help you to navigate the life-changing first year of motherhood. You’ll learn quick and easy mindfulness and hypnosis techniques to create moments of calm wherever you need it - even at four a.m. with a restless baby! As well as this, you’ll discover how to use these powerful tools to help with specific challenges along the way, such as fatigue, anxiety around breastfeeding, relationships and the end of maternity leave.

Written from the perspectives of both therapist and busy mom, Self-Care for New Moms features several eye-opening exercises, interviews from a village of experts (who also happen to be moms), and helpful interventions to help you get through the chronic depletion common to the postpartum year.

Martha and Becky Blackwater are more than sisters - they're each other's lifelines. When Martha finds herself struggling to balance early motherhood and her growing business, Becky steps in to babysit her niece, Layla, without a second thought, bringing the two women closer than ever. But then the unthinkable happens, and Becky is charged with murder. Nine months later, Becky is on trial and maintains her innocence - and so does Martha. Martha sets out to uncover exactly what happened that night and how things could have gone so wrong.

In Better Breastfeeding, Dr. Linda Dahl presents a new paradigm for breastfeeding based on diagnosing and treating mothers and babies using anatomy and physiology, offering a comprehensive overview of how breastfeeding works, why it fails, and what to do about it. Dr. Dahl takes you through the basics of breastfeeding in a week-by-week guide and explores solutions for little-understood difficulties like gape restriction and tongue tie, nipple and breast pain, issues with milk supply, or abnormal nursing behaviors.

You’re excited to be a new mom…but you have no idea what to expect. You know it’s going to be a magical experience, but you’re feeling both exhilarated and scared. You’ve been looking forward to this moment for as long as you can remember, but now that it's drawing nearer, you’re getting nervous. Maybe you’ve looked through countless websites on motherhood but your research is becoming more overwhelming than helpful. Don’t worry: You are not alone!

This book shows us the results of focusing on our children's strengths rather than always trying to correct their weaknesses. Most parents struggle with this shift because they suffer from a negativity bias, thanks to evolutionary development, giving them "strengths blindness". By showing us how to throw the "strengths switch", Lea Waters demonstrates how not only can we help our children build resilience, optimism, and achievement but we can also help inoculate them against today's pandemic of depression and anxiety.

Taking good care of yourself in the first three months of your new baby’s life—the fourth trimester—brings crucial benefits for you, for your baby, and for your partner and family. With this important book, you now have the resources to have an ideal fourth trimester experience. Cynthia Gabriel, a doula and the author of the best-selling book Natural Hospital Birth, delivers all the information, guidance, and encouragement you need as a new mother to take care of your body, mind, and spirit during the vital months of the fourth trimester.

Most new mothers bring their infants to the doctor but ignore any distressing feelings or sensations they might themselves have—that sense of being "rattled" at many moments throughout the day and night. In Rattled, Dr. Nicole Pensak shares her own experiences and those of her patients to help new mothers feel informed, validated, and guided through matrescence. After giving birth, a woman often feels like a completely different person. It may sound dramatic, but the rollercoaster of physical and psychological changes affects the brain and body in a similar way that adolescence changes us.

As someone who used to put themselves last - doing everything she thought was "right" for her children and family, but not really listening to what her body and her spirit was begging for - Amy understands firsthand the overwhelm and complex range of emotions that mothers face. Amy’s background as a journalist set her on the path to uncover all that she could about the latest research on matrescence, the transition a woman undergoes when she becomes a mother. She now shares what she’s learned in the hope that it will help you navigate this stage of your life.

When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity. In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir, Catherine reconstructs her sense of self.