Kids Development

Kids are coming out as trans at younger and younger ages, which is a good thing for them. But what written resources are available to parents, teachers, and mental health professionals who need to support these children? Elijah C. Nealy, a therapist and former deputy executive director of New York City’s LGBT Community Center, and himself a trans man, has written the first-ever comprehensive guide to understanding, supporting, and welcoming trans kids, covering everything from family life to school and mental health issues, as well as much more.

Children today live in an unpredictable, disruptive, and often violent world. Many of them live in two different homes with different sets of expectations. They face bullying at school and online. They hear news of school shootings, and racially or religiously motivated violence. They may have lost a friend or a loved one. As parents, the impulse to protect our children is strong, but that very protection can end up handicapping them for life. Rather than seek to save them from the hard things, parents must teach their kids how to cope with and rise above their problems.

Tech Generation: Raising Balanced Kids in a Hyper-Connected World guides parents in teaching their children how to reap the benefits of living in a digital world while also preventing its negative effects. Dr. Mike Brooks and Dr. Jon Lasser, psychologists with extensive experience working with kids, parents, and teachers, combine cutting-edge research and expertise to create an engaging and helpful guide that emphasizes the importance of the parent-child relationship.

Learn how to nurture your highly sensitive child by elevating their strengths and navigating their differences. Does your child often experience meltdowns or have trouble with highly stimulating environments? Or maybe they are highly intuitive and empathetic? These traits could all be signs that your child is highly sensitive. While being highly sensitive is a personality trait rather than a psychological disorder, your child may develop other disorders, such as anxiety or depression, more easily. Luckily, you can help guide them through their feelings.

Every parent wishes to see their daughter grow up strong and self-assured in her identity. Is your girl grappling with insecurities that hinder her from fully expressing herself? Does she face challenges in mastering her social interactions and making meaningful connections? Tierra Williams, an advocate for young Black girls’ empowerment, has poured her passion and expertise into Positive Affirmations for Black Girls, a vital resource for nurturing confidence, self-love, and motivation.

Dr. Kathy Koch (pronounced “cook”), author of Screens and Teens and 8 Great Smarts, will teach you proven strategies for training your child’s heart and parenting in a way that honors God. She’ll help you move your child from “I can’t, I won’t" to “I can, I will, and I did”.

No Bad Kids presents Janet Lansbury’s signature approach to discipline, which she sees as a parent's act of compassion and love for a child. Full of wisdom and encouragement, it covers all your common toddler concerns, such as why toddlers need clear boundaries (and how to set them without shouting), advice for parenting a strong-willed child, how to be a gentle leader, and Lansbury’s secret for staying calm.

How do children thrive? As a parent, you probably think about this all the time. You want your children to have happy, healthy, and meaningful lives - but what's the best way to support them? In How Children Thrive, developmental pediatrician and parent Dr. Mark Bertin provides a positive, simple, and empowering approach for raising children of all ages. Bringing together mindfulness, new science on brain development, and the messy reality of being a parent, Dr. Bertin has a created a breakthrough guide that will help children - and their parents - flourish.

Attention, mood, emotions, behaviors, organization communication, social interactions, learning, and confidence all have one thing in common—the brain learning. Your child’s brain mines how they take in, process, and react to the world around them, influencing everything, from their thoughts and feelings to actions and interactions. Brain development is an active process that has no true end point, as the brain continues to evolve and improve throughout life. Yet all too often parents and educators take a passive role in this process, wishing, hoping, and praying for growth and change.

Raising kids today is more challenging than it has ever been. Technology, social media, and the ever-shifting standards of what is right and wrong can make parenting in modern-day culture difficult to navigate. If we want to win the battle as parents, we need to have the desire to truly parent well.

This Big Book collection of positive affirmations is a nurturing embrace, a protective shield, and a guiding star seeking to ensure that every Black child listening to it feels seen, heard, and loved. The affirmations are carefully crafted, not just as repetitive statements but as statements of strength, each one aiming to fortify the self-esteem of the listener.

There are many books out there to teach you how to handle your children after they graduate from diapers, but none tells you how to proceed once they graduate from high school. As new patterns emerge in the lives of young adults, parents find that their grown children have bigger problems than they did just a few years ago. How to Raise Your Adult Children is a manual for anxious moms and dads.

How Coddling Kids Is Killing Kids' Confidence is about a boxing coach (Donté) who shares tips with parents to help them prepare their child(ren) for adulthood. What Donté has targeted in this book is that mental health concerns were happening WAY before the pandemic was a concern, and what he saw was how parenting was causing much of the mental health crisis. Instead of reacting to the variety of concerns parents were coming to him to help their kids with, he decided to be proactive and write a book to help parents at home to solve some of the root problems.

No Kids Required is the story of 20 women who are choosing to be childfree. It showcases the blessings and burdens that come with their decision, how they fill their free time, and the countless reasons why these women decided that kids are not required. It’s an honest and insightful story about respecting one another’s choices and living life on your terms.

As a global pandemic shuttered schools across the country in 2020, parents found themselves thrust into the role of teacher — in more ways than one. Not only did they take on remote school supervision, but after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, many also grappled with the responsibility to teach their kids about social justice — with few resources to guide them.

From two leading child and adolescent mental health experts comes a guide for the parents of every college and college-bound student who want to know what’s normal mental health and behavior, what’s not, and how to intervene before it’s too late. All parenting is in preparation for letting go. However, the paradox of parenting is that the more we learn about late adolescent development and risk, the more frightened we become for our children, and the more we want to stay involved in their lives.

Ever wondered what would happen if you took your autistic three-year-old on a haunted ghost ride? Or what your reaction would be if your seven-year-old grabbed a stranger’s backfat in the changing rooms? Wonder no more! Raising the SEN-Betweeners is a very honest guide for all those parents in similar shoes, navigating the challenges, joys and hilariously unpredictable moments every day. If that is you, this book will make one thing very clear: you are not alone.

With nearly 43 percent of parents getting sleep-deprived and each parent losing 109 minutes of sleep daily during their child’s first year, you are not alone. Sleep deprivation can severely affect your physical and mental performance by causing deficits in judgment, depressed mood, memory issues, or trouble concentrating. If you’ve tried sleep training in the past and failed terribly, this is a golden opportunity for you because the methods highlighted inside are expert-approved.

In The Homework Myth, nationally known educator and parenting expert Alfie Kohn systematically examines the usual defenses of homework - that it promotes higher achievement, "reinforces" learning, and teaches study skills and responsibility. None of these assumptions, he shows, actually passes the test of research, logic, or experience.

Confused about the conflicting recommendations about how to feed children well and prevent eating and body image problems in teens? Listening to Nurture is like having a conversation with a compassionate fellow parent who has done decades of fieldwork on the subject. Heidi Schauster writes from her nearly 30 years of experience treating people with disordered eating, her own lived experience as a recovered person, and as a parent of two young adults.