Family Psychology

In the last decade there has been a revolution in our understanding of the minds of infants and young children. We used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Now Alison Gopnik - a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother - explains the cutting-edge scientific and psychological research that has revealed that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined.

Clinical psychologist and author of The Defining Decade, Meg Jay takes us into the world of the supernormal: those who soar to unexpected heights after childhood adversity. Drawing on nearly two decades of work with clients and students, Jay tells the tale of ordinary people made extraordinary by these all-too-common experiences, everyday superheroes who have made lives out of dodging bullets and leaping over obstacles, even as they hide in plain sight as doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, parents, activists, teachers, and students.

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.

If your child is between the ages of nine and twelve, you are in the throes of the 'between' years. Not quite a child and not yet a teenager, tweens embody a very specific stage of development that once understood will revolutionise the way you parent, educate and support those in your care. In Tweens, award-winning parenting educator Michelle Mitchell explains that this is the most rapid period of development since toddlerhood. Right now, before the full pressures of high school hit, you have a window of opportunity that can change the trajectory of adolescence and beyond.

In her groundbreaking first book, Gender Born, Gender Made, Dr. Diane Ehrensaft coined the term gender creative to describe children whose unique gender expression or sense of identity is not defined by a checkbox on their birth certificate. Now, with The Gender Creative Child, she returns to guide parents and professionals through the rapidly changing cultural, medical, and legal landscape of gender and identity.

In Parenting ADHD Now!, Diane and Elaine combine their practical know-how and professional expertise to offer immediate, actionable strategies you can use to guide and support your ADHD child compassionately and effectively.

As parents today, we often feel that our role is to protect our children from the world: to cushion them when they fall, to lift them over obstacles, and to remove sharp rocks from their path. But controlling a child’s entire environment and keeping all pain at bay isn’t feasible—we can’t prepare the world for our children, so instead we should focus on preparing our children for the world.

Parenting can be overwhelming when your child is struggling with an anxiety disorder or OCD—but it doesn’t have to be. Anxiety Coach is a step-by-step guide full of useful strategies, techniques, and action plans designed to address all the most common forms of anxiety, including social anxiety, separation anxiety, generalized anxiety, specific phobias, panic attacks, and OCD. It teaches parents what anxiety is and how to recognize when it becomes a problem, explains why children need to face their fears to overcome them, and introduces listeners to exposure therapy and its application.

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.

Imagine waking up one day to discover that you have forgotten everything about your life. Your only link with the past, your only hope for the future, is your identical twin. Now imagine, years later, discovering that your twin had not told you the whole truth about your childhood, your family, and the forces that had shaped you. Why the secrets? Why the silences? You have no choice but to begin again. This has been Alex's reality: a world where memories are just the stories people tell you, where fact and fiction are impossible to distinguish.

Being afraid of the dark is a very common fear among children. Even adults jump at shadows. Ever watched a horror movie and tried to get a glass of water in dim light? From bugs to darkness to strange phenomena, children are afraid of the unknown. They have no reference point to explain these new stimuli, and they turn to the most basic instinct of human nature: fight or flight.

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.

When Brooke Shields welcomed her newborn daughter, Rowan Francis Henchy, into the world, something unexpected followed: a crippling depression. Now, for the first time, Brooke talks about the trials, tribulations, and finally the triumphs that occurred before, during, and after the birth of her daughter.

Middle childhood, the period for those aged 8–12 years old, is often the most overlooked phase of a child’s development, but it’s the age where play continues to serve an important role in their emotional growth. It’s also an age where we are most likely to stop playing with our children. With over 20 years of clinical expertise and neuroscientific research, psychotherapist and parenting expert Joanna Fortune shares her proven techniques that will enable you to better understand your relationship with your children as they grow.

This classic guide has helped tens of thousands of therapists integrate play therapy and family therapy techniques in clinical practice.

Ready or Not explores how today’s parenting techniques and our myopic educational system are failing to prepare children for their certain-to-be-uncertain future - and how we can reverse course to ensure their lasting adaptability, resilience, health, and happiness.

Acute trauma and addictive disorders are often a result of psychological injuries experienced as a child, while typically producing long-term and harmful generational consequences on loved ones and other family members. Claudia Black presents a portrait of a broken family system, exploring how addiction and trauma develop in families, their damaging repetition, and offers a roadmap for healing.

After getting a master’s degree in clinical psychology, Dasha Kiper became the live-in caregiver for a Holocaust survivor with Alzheimer’s disease. For a year, she endured the emotional strain of looking after a person whose condition disrupts the rules of time, order, and continuity. Inspired by her own experience and her work counseling caregivers in the subsequent decade, Kiper offers an entirely new way to understand the symbiotic relationship between patients and those tending to them.

Here is a landmark book that reveals the way boys think and that shows parents, educators, and coaches how to reach out and help boys overcome their most common yet difficult challenges - by the best-selling author who changed our conception of adolescent girls. What you'll find in Masterminds and Wingmen is critically important for every parent - or anyone who cares about boys - to know. Collaborating with a large team of middle- and high-school-age editors, Rosalind Wiseman has created an unprecedented guide to the life your boy is actually experiencing - his on-the-ground reality.

Love Bombing is a radical new method for resetting the emotional thermostats of troubled children and their parents, setting them on a much happier trajectory. It is simple to do, easily explained, and works for both severe and mild problems from aged three to early teenage.