In the latest body of work by author and photographer Claiborne Swanson Frank, the artist set out to explore what modern motherhood means in the 21st century. Turning her lens on 70 iconic families of mothers and children from such celebrated names as Delfina Figueras, Carolina Herrera, Lauren Santo Domingo, Anne Vyalitsyna, Aerin Lauder, and Patti Hansen, Swanson Frank’s stunning portraits capture the emotional bonds and beauty that frame the primal relationship of a mother and her child. Complementing her work is a series of questions-and-answers, in which Swanson Frank delicately tasks each mother to look within themselves and express what being a mother truly means to them. Their answers, while exceedingly thoughtful and introspective, are also amusing, fascinating, and moving. Each one of these deeply intimate and stunning portraits will captivate and inspire readers as they embark on this profound journey that reminds us all of the power of motherhood and the great gift of love.
Krys Malcolm Belc's visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood—conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding his son Samson—eventually clarified his gender identity. Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner, Anna, adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as “the natural mother of the child.” By considering how the experiences contained under the umbrella of “motherhood” don’t fully align with Belc’s own experience, The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family. With this visual memoir in essays, Belc has created a new kind of life record, one that engages directly with the documentation often thought to constitute a record of one’s life—childhood photos, birth certificates—and addresses his deep ambivalence about the “before” and “after” so prevalent in trans stories, which feels apart from his own experience. The Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative, with prose that delights in the intimate dailiness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.
Dozens of influential leaders have heard the pleas of mothers and children in developing countries. Raising their voices to inspire a movement to increase healthy pregnancies and lower death rates, Melinda Gates, Kay Warren, Bill Frist, Kimberly Williams Paisley, Michael W. Smith and more speak out about why people of faith must get involved in The Mother and Child Project: Raising Our Voices for Health and Hope. Almost 287,000 women die each year because of pregnancy and birth complications. Many orphans are left behind in the wake of this tragedy, and without a mother, many of those children die as well. If only enough people knew. We have the resources to prevent this crisis, but we must take action. Fortunately, Hope Through Healing Hands, a nonprofit organization promoting awareness for healthy mothers and children worldwide, is already spreading the word. Not only can we save lives, reduce abortions, and decrease death rates, but also we can help build healthier, thriving families and bring stability and sustainability to families, communities and nations. The question is, will you join them?
Intimate portraits and personal stories reveal the wisdom of mothering in indigenous cultures around the world, beautifully expressed in this illustrated book. From the Arctic to the Sahara, from the Himalaya to the Amazon, award-winning journalist and photographer Jan Reynolds introduces us to women whose traditional parenting practices can enrich the lives of parents and children everywhere.
The Mother and Her Child: Clinical Aspects of Attachment, Separation, and Loss, edited by Salman Akhtar, focuses upon the formation of an individual's self in the crucible of the early mother-child relationship. Bringing together contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts and child observational researchers, it elucidates the nuances of mothering, the child's tie to the mother, the mysteries of secure attachment, and the hazards of insecure attachment. These experts also discuss issues of separation, loss, and alternate sources of love when the mother is absent or emotionally unavailable, while highlighting the relevance of such ideas to the treatment of children and adults.
Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.
"This is a conceptually innovative book which expands the meaning of motherhood to include mothers 'without child'; it is also a compassionate political book which refuses the boundary between 'good enough' and 'bad' mothers. Mother Without Child is an engaging, witty, and provocative literary study which should fascinate anyone who is interested in mothering or in looking for new ways to talk about motherhood without erasing some women's experience or dividing mothers from each other."--Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace "Hansen positions her study in a genuinely new space . . . taboo ground, which demands not only a great deal of courage to address, but also enormous intelligence and insight. Hansen is up to this task. . . hers is a pioneer study that will have a significant impact on the ways that non-procreative motherhood is discussed and understood." --Madelon Sprengnether, author of The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis "Since the beginnings of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, feminist scholars have been obsessed with motherhood. Mother Without Child takes us to the next stage in this fascinated and fascinating exploration. Through illuminating readings of contemporary stories of thwarted motherhood, Hansen challenges the persistent and constraining definitions of the good and even the good-enough mother. She enjoins us to listen to the moving, devastating, and often inspiring stories of mothers who survive the loss of their children and she urges us to find there not the angry voices of feminist daughters who cannot forgive their patriarchal mothers, but alternative stories of a different maternity that can lead us to alternative plots and visions of women's lives. We need this book."--Marianne Hirsch, author of The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism "A careful, committed, and freshly clarifying voice. Hansen's graceful prose and finely interwoven explorations are much needed at this time. Through readings of contemporary fiction, she enriches our vocabulary for discussing the overdetermined topic of motherhood and deepens our understanding of both its psychological and contemporary political dimensions. Mother Without Child is a book for historians and social scientists as well as literary scholars."--Laura Doyle, author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture
The photographer uses pictures to portray love of childhood, of nature and its flowers and seasons. The photgraphs of mother and children are of Tasha Tudor and her children.
Lyric Stokes lives, by most standards, a charmed life. Married to Michael Stokes, a prominent heart surgeon, she has financial security and lives in the lap of luxury. All is not perfect, though. Lyric feels inadequate because she gave birth to a daughter, rather than the son that her husband so desperately wanted. After an unexpected turn of events, Lyric discovers that she's pregnant again, but now she has to decide whether she even wants to keep the child she has longed for. She seeks solace in her church, where her daughter also feels at home;but they can't get Michael to join them. Disagreeing with organized religion, he has put his job before all else, including God. The distance between the couple grows further every day. Nigel Fredericks has a history of stalking women. He's been accused, but never convicted. Now he's set his sights on Lyric. She's at a low point in her life, and Nigel knows just how to take advantage of that vulnerability. Lyric's life is turned upside down. Nigel is like a cancer eating away at her mental stability, her marriage, and ultimately, her life. Will Michael reevaluate his priorities and his faith in time to save his family?
In 1970, as the war in Vietnam was heating up, Ostriker was awaiting the birth of her son. On April 30, President Nixon announced the bombing of Cambodia. On May 14, four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. The poems in this collection confront Ostriker’s personal tumult as she considered the world she had brought her son into.
