House Parent

Life isn't a game. Life isn't an empty bottle of bourbon spinning on a warehouse floor as I hold my breath. I feel weak when others perceive me as strong. I'm passionate though I appear to hate the world around me. I see beauty in all ugly things. I feel pain when I laugh. No one knows the truth. Well, no one knew the truth until now. Somehow, Brody Pearson understands more about me than anyone else in my life. The severed connection should mean something significant, but I don't know if I can forget all my self-proclaimed promises.

In this groundbreaking book, parenting expert and acclaimed author of the bestselling book Simplicity Parenting Kim John Payne, M.Ed., flips the script on children’s challenging or defiant behavior and lays out an elegantly simple plan to support parents in establishing loving, age-sensitive boundaries that help children feel safe and settled. In short: What looks like misbehavior is actually your children’s signal that they’re feeling lost, that they are trying to find direction and looking to you to guide them back on course.

Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government, a pacifist who carries a gun, a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy, a cyberwhiz who hates computers, a robust bon vivant who can be as squeamish as any fop, a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol.

From within the hopelessness and terror of China's Cultural Revolution, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening, and the magical power of storytelling. "An unexpected miracle," raves the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "a delicate, and often hilarious, tale."

In his groundbreaking best seller The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker showed millions of readers that, like every creature on earth, human beings can predict violent behavior. Now, in this exclusive audio presentation of Protecting the Gift, de Becker empowers parents to fully trust their own intuition when it comes to their children's safety. In this indispensable resource, de Becker provides keen insights into the behavior and strategies of predators. He offers practical new steps to enhance children's safety at every age level: specific questions parents can ask to effectively screen and evaluate babysitters, daycare services, schools, and doctors; a "Test of 12" safety skills children need before being alone in public; warning signs to help parents protect children from sexual abuse; and how to keep teenage girls and boys from unsafe situations with peers and adults. De Becker also shatters the myth that rules like "Never talk to strangers" will keep your children safe. By showing what danger really looks like - as opposed to what we might imagine it looks like - de Becker gives parents freedom from many common worries and unwarranted fears.

One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor.

This is two stories in one. The first is about my two daughters, Daniela and Selena, living half time with their mother, Anna, and half time with me, their father. The second is about my son, Isaac, also living half time with his mother, Joni, and half time with me, his father. Anna and I broke up before the younger girl was two years old. Joni and I broke up when Isaac was two. Both stories describe the adventures of single parenting.

Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. Because his father has lost his job, Eniola spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers, begging when he must, dreaming of a big future. Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. Now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice, she is beloved by Kunle, the volatile son of an ascendant politician.

From a leading pediatric sleep physician comes a revolutionary program that will have everyone in the house sleeping through the night. When Dr. Craig Canapari became a father, he realized that all his years of 36-hour hospital shifts didn't even come close to preparing him for the sleep deprivation that comes with parenthood. The difference is that parents don’t get a break - it’s hard to know if there’s a night of uninterrupted sleep anywhere in the foreseeable future. Sleepless nights for kids mean sleepless nights for the rest of the family....

When 81-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth - and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist.

With the increasing pressure to excel at parenting, work, and personal relationships, it's easy to feel stressed and dissatisfied. This targeted positive discipline guide gives parents the tools to parent effectively without sacrificing their well-being or giving up on their life goals. Instead of creating unachievable expectations, parents will learn how to play to their strengths at work and at home. Attitude is key - if you feel confident in your parenting abilities and at your job, your children are more likely to adopt an attitude of self-reliance and cooperation.

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".

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.

Have you ever wondered why celebrities look so rested in such a short time after giving birth? The answer: baby specialists like Helen Moon. A baby specialist and professional nanny for the past 25 years, Helen has worked closely with hundreds of families, including some of Hollywood's biggest stars. Helen knows that the first six weeks of a baby's life - when parents tend to be nervous, siblings are needy, and new babies need immediate and constant attention - has a huge impact on the entire family.

Mothers: everybody has one, and each has a story to tell. Every mother knows that good parenting can call for heroic measures. As these tales from ancient traditions show, most rise to the task and do the best they can. Whether mothers have starring or supporting roles in these stories, their actions are the ones on which the plots turn. Here are tales of gentle wisdom and fierce emotion, everyday chores, and unthinkable challenges.

Mindfulness - the quality of attention that combines full awareness with acceptance of each moment, just as it is - is gaining broad acceptance among mental health professionals as an adjunct to treatment. This little audiobook is a very appealing introduction to mindfulness meditation for children and their parents. In a simple and accessible way, it describes what mindfulness is and how mindfulness-based practices can help children calm down, become more focused, fall asleep more easily, alleviate worry, manage anger, and generally become more patient and aware.

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.

Eating disorders are serious physical and emotional problems that can have life-threatening consequences for both females and males. Eating disorders include extreme attitudes, emotions, and behaviors surrounding food issues and weight. An eating disorder is no joke and must not be kept on the down low.

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.

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.