House Parent

After surviving a traumatic childhood in 1970s New York and young adulthood living in the shadow of her flamboyant mother, Rita, a makeup-addicted former television singer, Elissa Altman has managed to build a very different life, settling in Connecticut with her wife of nearly 20 years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, still orbiting around her mother but keeping far enough away to preserve the stable, independent world she has built as a writer and editor. Then Elissa is confronted with the unthinkable.

Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion—a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections.

The mother-daughter relationship sets the stage for our state of health and well-being for our entire lives. Because our mothers are our first and most powerful female role models, our most deeply ingrained beliefs about ourselves as women come from them. And our behavior in relationships, with food, with our children, with our mates, and with ourselves, is a reflection of those beliefs.

In this smart and subversively funny memoir, Kristen Howerton navigates the emotional and sometimes messy waters of motherhood and challenges the idea that there’s a “right” way to raise kids. Recounting her successes, trials, mishaps, and hard-won wisdom, this mother of four advocates for letting go of the expectations, the guilt, and the endless race to be the perfect parent to the perfect child in the perfect family.

Renowned sociologist Janice Johnson Dias has devoted her life to nurturing and training girls to become changemakers - whether through her investment in her daughter Marley’s humanitarian projects or through her work with the GrassROOTS Community Foundation “SuperCamp” she cofounded for girls. In these unprecedented times, her work has never been more urgent, as parents find themselves asking: How do we teach girls to change the world?

Many moms live under the weight of seemingly constant fear. Moms worry about everything from their kids’ safety and emotional health to that weird little rash on their ankle. They are the referees, social planners, medics, financial consultants, cooks, travel agents, educational specialists, family therapists, and housekeepers. It’s utterly exhausting. Unfortunately, it’s not just exhausting, it leaves them flustered. Most of us don’t have access to the support or resources we need to manage being flustered in a healthier way.

Instagram. Whisper. Yik Yak. Vine. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales' riveting and explosive American Girls.

In rural North Carolina, in 1951, despite parental reassurances, a typhoid shot hurt. It hurt even more when the children saw who would be administering the shot: Miss Winnie, a large, dictatorial nurse who had been "especially built by the nursing school so she would never blow away in a hard wind".

Storyteller Donald Davis had a very sensible mother. She had a pretty good idea of what boys would do, so she was always on the lookout. As Davis later learned, always being on the lookout is what mamas do. His vigilant but gentle mother gave her son multiple gifts in life and, as we learn in the end, gifts that do not end with her passing.

Two new Appalachian stories from the author of the award winning Listening for the Crack of Dawn; an ideal introduction to contemporary storytelling for adults. Both stories are based upon real people. In the first, a disastrous birthday enables a child to learn more than an adult possibly could. In the second, two unusual people live their conviction that people are more important than things.

For Harlowe Upton-Jones, life has never been a straight line. Shipped off to live with her paternal grandparents after a mysterious cult killed her mother and father, she has grown up chasing the question behind the curve, becoming part of a tight-knit teen detective agency. Welcome to Spindrift House. The stories and legends surrounding the decrepit property are countless and contradictory, but one thing is clear: there are people willing to pay a great deal to determine the legal ownership of the house.

Allie is British and dreams of being a spy. Sage is an only child from sunny California. They meet when their families swap houses for the summer. Though they’re polar opposites, Allie and Sage quickly realize that they’re both dealing with family issues—Sage’s parents may be on the brink of divorce, and Allie’s struggling to feel heard in her big family. It may take a trip around the world for them to find their place at home.

Our country is in a profound crisis: a crisis of decency, of civility, of character. And families today are experiencing a new set of realities. Our best instincts are undermined at every turn, and our families, to which we turn in crisis, are feeling the strain. Working parents are harried, tired, and overextended. Mary Pipher understands this. She's a good listener, perhaps the best listener in America. And what she has to say goes straight to the heart.Confronted with today's challenges, parents feel helpless to protect their children from the enemy within their homes: the innapropriate television their kids watch for hours, the computer and virtual reality games that keep them from playing outside, when they should be learning from and about the real world. Compounding this is the fact that our psychological theories don't work anymore. These theories were developed decades ago, when families were tightly knit, relatively monolithic institutions, and they're dated. Pipher argues that such theories are of little help in our violent, sexualized contemporary culture. And while diagnosing the problem is the first step in curing it, Pipher offers ideas for simple actions we can all take to help rebuild our families and strengthen our communities.

Regardless of how wealthy or poor their parents are, all black boys must confront and surmount the "achievement gap": a divide that shows up not only in our sons' test scores, but in their social and emotional development, their physical well-being, and their outlook on life. As children, they score as high on cognitive tests as their peers, but at some point, the gap emerges. Why? This is the question Joe Brewster, M.D., and Michele Stephenson asked when their own son, Idris, began struggling in a new school.

Marta Segrelles, psicóloga y autora de Abraza a la niña que fuiste, vuelve con un libro muy especial para sanar las heridas de la infancia que más huella dejan: las que están presentes en la relación con nuestra madre.

The notorious baby boomers - the largest age cohort in history - are approaching the end and starting to plan their final moves in the game of life. Now they are asking: What was that all about? Was it about acquiring things or changing the world? Was it about keeping all your marbles? Or is the only thing that counts after you're gone the reputation you leave behind?

Una visión diferente e innovadora de la doctora Shefali Tsabary para la crianza de los hijos. La doctora Shefali Tsabary explica que nuestros hijos solo pueden convertirse en adultos conscientes si nosotros, como padres, procuramos elevarnos a un estado superior de consciencia. Cambiando por completo la idea tradicional de crianza de los hijos, la doctora Tsabary aleja el epicentro de la clásica relación padres-hijos basada en que los primeros «lo saben todo» y lo lleva a una relación mutua en la que los padres también aprenden de los hijos.

Nadie dijo que ser padre sea una tarea sencilla. Enojo, envidia, frustración y vergüenza son emociones que muchas veces experimentamos con respecto a nuestros hijos y que, por si fuera poco, generalmente se acompañan de culpabilidad. Ese “lado oculto” de la relación padre/hijo puede arruinar la relación y alejarnos cada vez más de ellos.

La deuxième histoire de la série "Quelqu'un pour maman !" est "Un loup-garou pour maman !" Le petit Mahari est de retour. Sa première tentative pour trouver l'amour pour sa mère ne s'est pas si bien passée.

Even the most well-adjusted moms and dads can experience peer pressure and conflicts with other adults that make them act like they're back in seventh grade. In Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads, Rosalind Wiseman gives us the tools to handle difficult situations involving teachers and other parents with grace.