Politics For Kids

Trent Shelton is a motivational speaker, former NFL player, and founder of the nonprofit RehabTime. Trent reaches millions of followers of all ages each week with his videos and messages about relationships, personal success, life, and faith.

If we judge the West by the state of its families, the West is sick. Millions of children barely see their parents, or for only a few minutes a day. One in two families break down, for better or worse. The casualties throng the family courts. Our maladjusted system has made the ideal of 'mom' and 'dad' - i.e. a loving, constant, adult presence in a child's infancy - a rarity. To speak of the 'maternal instinct' still elicits scorn or embarrassment from some feminists, who continue to mock 'holy motherhood'.

One of the main topics of cultural conversation during the last decade was the supposed "fertility crisis" and whether modern women could figure out a way to have it all - a successful, demanding career and the required 2.3 children - before their biological clocks stopped ticking. Now, however, conversation has turned to whether it's necessary to have it all (see Anne-Marie Slaughter) or, perhaps more controversial, whether children are really a requirement for a fulfilling life.

Foregoing motherhood has traditionally marked a woman as “other.” With no official place setting for her in our society, she has hovered on the sidelines: the quirky girl, the neurotic career obsessive, the “eccentric” aunt. Instead of continuing to paint women without kids as sad, self-obsessed, or somehow dysfunctional, what if we saw them as boldly forging a first-in-a-civilization vision for a fully autonomous womankind? Or as journalist and thought leader Ruby Warrington asks, What if being a woman without kids were in fact its own kind of legacy?

Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. was only fourteen when he first became entangled with serial rapist and murderer Dean Corll in 1971. Fellow Houston, Texas, teenager David Brooks had already been ensnared by the charming older man, bribed with cash to help lure boys to Corll's home. Corll baited Henley with the same deal he'd given Brooks: $200 for each boy they could bring him.

In recent years, numerous studies have shown that bright, charming, seemingly confident and socially skilled teenagers from affluent, loving families are experiencing epidemic rates of depression, substance abuse, and anxiety disorders - rates higher than in any other socioeconomic group of American adolescents. Materialism, pressure to achieve, perfectionism, and disconnection are combining to create a perfect storm that is devastating children of privilege and their parents alike.

All children and teens stress out at times, but if they also have ADHD, their anxiety can skyrocket. Anxiety Relief Tools for Kids and Teens with ADHD: A Practical Guide for Parents has smart strategies that equip parents to equip their children to deal with anxiety. In this book, parents gain insight into how ADHD affects their children and why it causes so much anxiety. This guide is filled with exercises and activities that teach children and teens how to recognize their own ADHD symptoms, counteract them, and start reducing the anxiety caused by ADHD.

The modern day youth sports environment has taken the enjoyment out of athletics for our children. Currently, 70% of kids drop out of organized sports by the age of 13, which has given rise to a generation of overweight, unhealthy young adults. There is a solution. John O'Sullivan shares the secrets of the coaches and parents who have not only raised elite athletes, but have done so by creating an environment that promotes positive core values and teaches life lessons instead of focusing on wins and losses.

In this practical guide, developmental psychologist (and mother of two) Christia Spears Brown uses science-based research to show how over-dependence on gender can limit kids, making it harder for them to develop into unique individuals. With a humorous, fresh, and accessible perspective, Parenting Beyond Pink & Blue addresses all the issues that contemporary parents should consider - from gender-segregated birthday parties and schools to sports, sexualization, and emotional intelligence.

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.

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.

The first accessible guide to examine Sensory Processing Disorder, The Out-of-Sync Child touched the hearts and lives of thousands of families. Carol Stock Kranowitz continues her significant work with this companion volume, which presents more than one hundred playful activities specially designed for kids with SPD.

The Book of Radical Answers is a groundbreaking work of non-fiction by author and activist Sonya Renee Taylor that gives honest, empowering and age appropriate answers to real questions from young listeners about health, sex, gender, race and justice. Steeped in joy and possibility, Taylor's writing assures kids that, as they mature, life will be fun, complicated, strange and wonderful, and most importantly, that they are amazing and have the ability to thrive with the inherent knowledge of their self-worth.

Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science. While he was working on his Atomic Energy badge for the Boy Scouts, David's obsessive attention turned to nuclear energy. Throwing caution to the wind, he plunged into a new project: building a model nuclear reactor in his backyard garden shed. Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the US government and from industry experts. Following blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David cobbled together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of radiation.

The perfect boredom-busting book for long winter evenings with the family, Richard Herring's Would You Rather? is packed with hundreds of the biggest questions to face us all, including: Would you rather have a conversation with a dolphin or an elephant? Would you rather fall in love or fall into a swimming pool full of your favourite biscuits? Would you rather live in a giant shoe or a giant peach? Would you rather own a car with Jimmy Carr, a lorry with Laurie Anderson or a van with Van Morrison?

In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians. They faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The children were Japanese-American, were malnourished and barefoot, and had no pool; they trained in the filthy irrigation ditches that snaked down from the mountains into the sugarcane fields.

In Teaching with Poverty in Mind: What Being Poor Does to Kids' Brains and What Schools Can Do About It, veteran educator and brain expert Eric Jensen takes an unflinching look at how poverty hurts children, families, and communities across the United States and demonstrates how schools can improve the academic achievement and life readiness of economically disadvantaged students.

Heather Shumaker has sparked much discussion with her "renegade rules for raising competent and compassionate kids". In this follow-up book, she takes on new hot-button issues like banning homework, technology use, and skipping kindergarten. Shumaker offers broader guidance on how parents can control their own anger and move from an overscheduled life to one of more free play.

It's a life-changing trip. Take it! John Ahern had a high-flying job, big house, loving wife and two great kids. But if this was success, why did he sense he was failing as a husband and father? So John did something insane. He quit the corporate world and bought a busted-up camper-van online to chase an improbable dream: a year travelling together as a family...on the road with kids.

Our children's first digital footprints are made before they can walk-even before they are born - as parents use fertility apps to aid conception, post ultrasound images, and share their baby's hospital mug shot. Then, in rapid succession come terabytes of baby pictures stored in the cloud, digital baby monitors with built-in artificial intelligence, and real-time updates from daycare. Unwittingly, parents, teachers, and other trusted adults are compiling digital dossiers for children that could be available to everyone - friends, employers, law enforcement - forever.