Blended Family Parenting

When it comes to a child's sense of family, what divorce breaks apart, solid co-parenting rebuilds. With a tested "here's how" approach, The Co-Parents' Handbook helps parents confidently take on the challenges of raising children in two homes. Addressing parents' questions about the emotional impact of separation, conflict, grief and recovery, the authors skillfully provide a road map for all members of the family to safely navigate through separation/divorce and beyond.

You found the love of your life, and you vowed to have, to hold, and to stepmother. You always thought that in time you'd grow to be the perfect, loving family. So why does it seem that the harder you try, the more unappreciated you feel? As a stepmother, therapist, and founder of the popular stepsforstepmothers.com, Dr. Rachelle Katz knows all too well how challenging stepmotherhood can be. Based on thousands of in-depth interviews and the latest research, she's created a powerful program to help you.

What’s missing in your stepfamily? If you’re in a stepfamily, you may feel as if something is missing. You can’t put it into words yet, but you know it’s a problem. Maybe you’re new to this. Maybe not. Still, everything from badly-behaved exes to parenting rifts causes squabbling that disrupts the harmony in your home. The Stepmom’s Book of Boundaries helps you thrive despite rocky relationships, schedule snafus, and more.

A response to all those grandmother books with flowers and puppies on the cover, Grandma Rules is a book for the hip, baby boomer grandma who realizes that after all the work she put into her own kids, she can take a break and have fun with her grandkids. A perfect gift for the greatest grandmothers you know, this book is laugh-out-loud funny while offering useful insights and tips on how to embrace the world’s greatest job.

In Baby Making for Everybody, queer millennial midwives Ray Rachlin and Marea Goodman use their professional expertise to demystify the dizzying process of pursuing parenthood as queer and solo people, offering detailed, gender-affirming, body-positive advice. The result is a much-needed compassionate step-by-step guide for every aspect of the complicated, messy, and glorious process of building a family.

This book is meant to be the ultimate guide to step-parenting, from understanding your role, building relationships with your stepchildren, navigating through legal complexities, to finding support networks. This is the guide, then, for you. Professional insights meshed with firsthand experiences give you a worldview on step-parenting. It will lead you through everyday strategies to deal with your stepchildren right down to how best to cope with potentially challenging issues like co-parenting with the biological parent.

When I started out on this journey, it all seemed pretty simple: I thought that love would be enough to see me through. I had no idea what it would take to create a fully blended family - just how many factors and emotions would be involved or how deep it would all go. How to Build a Family is the nurturing handbook I wish I'd been given. In it you'll find my experiences, as well as those of other blended families (because every family is unique), along with advice and tips from the experts who have guided me.

Breaking Free from a Narcissistic Co-Parent is a practical guide for parents co-parenting with a narcissistic ex-partner. Drawing on innovative research and clinical experience, the book explores narcissistic personality disorder and its impact on co-parenting. It offers practical strategies to help parents manage difficult situations and minimize conflict.

In Not with My Daughter!, Terry Vaughan gives dads vital information on how to decode the gestures, facial expressions, and verbal statements of all prospective boyfriends. With two daughters of his own rapidly coming of age, Vaughan realized he couldn't water-board every new boyfriend who came through his door. He came up with strategy that all dads can use to effectively "interview" and accurately assess the new men in their daughters' lives

The Stepparent Trap approach is based on reality and empathy. By embracing a new way to think about the family dynamics, you can begin to build real relationships with your stepchildren based on understanding, not just expectations.

Grandparenting is hard enough, but when you add in the blended family element, whether step or adopted, the challenge is even greater. How do you succeed when these children are not your own? How do you make them your own? Can you get them to love you? To like you? To trust you? How do successful grandparents do it? Dene Low, an award winning author and grandparent herself, explores thirty different sets of grandparents and provides tips and solutions from her interviews and research for grandparent success.

The 9-L model illustrated in Blended Families--Special Children explores the dynamics of stepfamilies caring for children with special needs and disabilities and presents the information in digestible nuggets ready for consumption by quintessential blended families juggling the demands of parenthood with caring for children with special needs.

Every new stepmom finds themselves struggling with these same thoughts. Life is meant to be tough, and joining a new family and assuming the role of "mom" is one of the toughest things imaginable. But I've got good news: All your problems are temporary! If you have an action plan and know what you're doing, you can seamlessly make the transition to stepmom. This book will give you that action plan.

Eating is an innate skill that has been overcomplicated by marketing schemes and a dieting culture. It’s time to leave the dieting culture behind for the whole family. It starts with the baby’s first bite! When babies show signs of readiness for solid foods, they can eat almost everything the family eats and become healthy, happy eaters in the process. By honoring self-regulation (also an innate skill) and focusing on a whole-food foundation, we can foster healthier children, parents, and families.  

In Loving a Highly Sensitive Person by Jonathan Baurer, you will have the emotional, psychological, and physical tools to better understand and celebrate the HSP you love.

Motherhood Smotherhood takes parents through the trenches of new parenting, warning listeners of the pleasures and perils of mommy blogs, new parent groups, self-described "lactivists", sleep fascists, incessant trend pieces on working versus non-working mothers, and the place where free time and self-esteem goes to die: Pinterest (back away from the hand-made flower headbands for baby!).

If your kids aren’t learning about sex from you, what are they learning about sex, and who is teaching them? Having "the talk" with your child does not have to be a terrifying and awkward event. Armed with The Sex-Wise Parent, Dr. Janet Rosenzweig’s groundbreaking book, you may find you never have to have "the talk". Dr. Rosenzweig shows you how you can help protect your children from sexual abuse, trauma, and bullying through your everyday interaction with them.

Fourteen years ago, Mike Milligan learned he would become a grandfather for the first time. He was surprised to find that there was little or no information available on what it means to be a grandfather, how to make the most of the experience, and how to be the best grandfather possible. Sure, there were shelves of books dedicated to grandmothers - all with cuddly covers depicting spring bouquets or gentle little lambs. But there was not a single book that spoke to him, a 64-year-old grandfather-to-be. It struck him that there were countless other grandfathers out there experiencing this same feeling of neglect.

A stepmother constantly sees to others' needs - those of her spouse, her kids, his kids, their kids. She also has to work so hard to maintain her marriage or deal with the emotional turmoil that can follow divorce and marrying again, that she may neglect her own needs. It's no wonder, then, that stepmothers often ask: Who's taking care of me? This is where Sue Patton Thoele steps in, offering practical advice and emotional support in a new edition of her book, The Courage to Be a Stepmom.

Co-parenting doesn’t have to be hard, or mean sacrificing either your family or your own happiness. It’s simply a matter of focus and choices. Combative to Collaborative: The Co-parenting Code channels parents’ interactions with each other to what they really want…to be good parents.