Family Psychology

Your guide to the emotions of pregnancy and early motherhood, from two of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists. With a combined 30 years of counseling new and expectant mothers, Dr. Sacks and Dr. Birndorf have seen firsthand how the pressure to be perfect, and perfectly happy, leaves women feeling confused and even ashamed of the emotions that can bubble up during pregnancy. Now, in What No One Tells You, the two psychiatrists show why it’s natural for “matrescence” - the birth of a mother - to be as stressful and transformative a period as adolescence.

When children are late in hitting developmental milestones, parents worry. And no delay causes more parental anxiety than late talking, which is associated in many parents' minds with such serious conditions as autism and severe intellectual disability. In fact, as children's speech expert Stephen Camarata points out in this enlightening book, children are late in beginning to talk for a wide variety of reasons.

Recently retired WWE superstar AJ Mendez Brooks is a powerhouse - strong, quirky, and totally confident. But that wasn’t always the case. With humor and tremendous heart, she opens up for the first time about her harrowing struggle to understand her demons and the diagnosis that helped her gain control over her life.

One of the country's leading researchers updates his revolutionary approach to solving - and preventing - children's sleep problems. Here Dr. Marc Weissbluth, a distinguished pediatrician and father of four, offers his groundbreaking program to ensure the best sleep for your child. In Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, he explains with authority and reassurance his step-by-step regime for instituting beneficial habits within the framework of your child's natural sleep cycles.

Spirited infants are the outliers—the exceptions to the “rules,” the extraordinary ones. They arrive in this world genetically wired to be alert and intense. Spirited babies put parents to the test and raising them takes special skills and patient perseverance. In this groundbreaking new book, beloved parenting expert Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, Ed.D., offers her findings in the fields of neuroscience, sleep, temperament, self-regulation, attachment, and parent-child interactions, and shares what she has learned from hands-on experiences with families.

Parenting is hard. That's why self-compassion is so important. In this empathetic resource, mindfulness expert and psychologist Susan M. Pollak helps you let go of constant self-judgment and treat yourself with the same kindness and caring you strive to offer your kids. Simple, yet powerful, guided meditation techniques (most under three minutes long) are easy to practice while doing the dishes, driving to work, or soothing a fussy baby. Learn to respond to your own imperfections like a supportive friend, not a harsh critic.

Just as you prepared your home to welcome a new child, it is important to prepare your heart and mind - especially if the child has suffered from a background of trauma. Perhaps your invitation for love is met with hostility and you find that this new member of your family rejects connection. It’s critical to acknowledge the effects of trauma on a child’s ability to attach. Mike and Kristin Berry realized this when they became adoptive and foster parents. They now offer guidance from their own journey to others parenting a child who has experienced past trauma.

When Hope Edelman finished writing Motherless Daughters, she thought she had said all she could about the long-term effects of early mother loss. Published in 1994, the book touched a nerve in women across the country and went on to become an enduring New York Times best seller. Edelman, who was 17 when her own mother died, told the collective story of mother loss with such candor, empathy, and informed wisdom that she quickly became a widely recognized expert on the topic.

Cory Friedman woke up one morning when he was five years old with the uncontrollable urge to twitch his neck. From that day forward his life became a hell of irrepressible tics and involuntary utterances, and Cory embarked on an excruciating journey from specialist to specialist to discover the cause of his disease. Soon it became unclear what tics were symptoms of his disease and what were side effects of the countless combinations of drugs. The only certainty is that it kept getting worse. Simply put: Cory Friedman's life was a living hell.

Internal Family Systems Therapy with Children details the application of IFS in child psychotherapy. The weaving together of theory, step-by-step instruction, and case material gives child therapists a clear roadmap for understanding and utilizing the healing power of this modality.

Die ungarische Psychologin Noémi Orvos-Tóth klärt in ihrem Ratgeber den Einfluss alter Familienkonflikte auf unsere Psyche. Tiefe Traumata, Lieblosigkeit und festgefahrene Verhaltensmuster werden von Generation zu Generation weitergegeben. Solange wir die Auseinandersetzung mit unserem familiären Erbe aufschieben, geben wir die negativen Muster von Schmerz und Misstrauen unbewusst an unsere Kinder weiter. Aber was sind diese Muster genau? Wo sind sie zu finden? Wie können sie durchbrochen werden?

Today’s college-bound kids are stressed, anxious, and navigating demands in their lives unimaginable to a previous generation. They’re performance machines, hitting the benchmarks they’re “supposed” to in order to reach the next tier of a relentless ladder. Then, their mental and physical exhaustion carries over right into first jobs. What have traditionally been considered the best years of life have become the beaten-down years of life.

Jeni Decker is five-foot nothing and one hundred and [redacted] pounds - a self-described roly-poly, forty-something, Reubenesque bon-bon of a gal, often called cute but never sexy. She has two sons with autism on opposite ends of the spectrum (Jake and Jaxson), a husband who prefers hunting to household chores, an Australian Shepherd named Sugar, and an albino frog named Humbert Humbert. This is her story - a brash, personal, and sometimes shocking memoir.

More than just a book full of the latest information, this is a dynamic, interactive, and personalized journey of recovery for those impacted by adverse childhood experiences (ACES). Finally, they can put their past behind them where it belongs! For those who have grown up in a family with addiction, mental illness, or other adverse childhood experiences (ACES), the heartache and pain doesn't end when they grow up and leave home.

Grounded in mindfulness and neuroscience, this pioneering book redefines discipline and outlines the five essential elements necessary for children to thrive: unconditional love, space to be themselves, mentorship, healthy boundaries, and mistakes that create learning and growth opportunities. In this book you will also discover parenting practices such as setting limits with love, working with difficult emotions, and forgiveness and compassion meditations that place discipline within a context of mindfulness.

In this groundbreaking book, psychologist Ted Zeff explores the unique challenges of sensitive boys, showing parents, educators, and mentors how to help sensitive boys grow into strong, happy, and confident men. Dr. Zeff offers practical advice on how to help your son increase his self-esteem and thrive in the family, at school, with friends, and in sports.

This book identifies seven stages of therapy that provide a framework for working with client's emotional, cognitive, somatic, and sensory experiences to heal from trauma. Through composite case illustrations, practitioners will learn how to safely mitigate a range of trauma content, including complicated grief, natural disaster, children in foster care, aggression, toxic divorce, traumatized infants diagnosed with neonatal abstinence syndrome, and young mothers recovering from opioid addiction.

For the estimated 20 million Americans with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder comes the third edition of All About ADHD by Dr. Thomas W. Phelan, an internationally renowned expert and lecturer on child discipline and ADHD. Completely updated with the latest research and treatment information, All About ADHD is a comprehensive guide to ADHD's symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment in children and adults.

Anyone caring for girls today knows that our daughters, students, and girls next door are more anxious and more prone to depression and self-harming than ever before. The question that no one has yet been able to credibly answer is Why? Now we have answers. As award-winning writer Donna Jackson Nakazawa deftly explains in Girls on the Brink, new findings reveal that the crisis facing today’s girls is a biologically rooted phenomenon: the earlier onset of puberty mixes badly with the unchecked bloom of social media and cultural misogyny.

We have long attributed man's violent, aggressive, competitive nature to his animal ancestry. But what if we are just as given to cooperation, empathy, and morality by virtue of our genes? What if our behavior actually makes us apes? What kind of apes are we?