"Dr. Punger's personal experiences include a doula-attended hospital birth without intervention, working while tandem nursing, tandem nursing beyond the toddler years, and perhaps most dramatically, a footling breech birth at home. Included are other women's experiences that go beyond the status quo. All stories have one feature in common: Dr. Punger goes beyond the medical standard-of-care that too often imposes on a woman's right to mother to the fullest. Dr. Punger gives you permission to birth just the way you want to and to breastfeed for how long you (and your baby) want to"--Page 4 of cover.
After being bombarded by parenting fad after parenting fad, moms and dads finally have a friendly, commonsense guide to raising thriving children. Today, many parents have rejected the dictatorships they resented from their own childhoods. But they overcorrected by turning into child-pleasers. Showering praise and letting kids rule the roost has actually eroded the very self-esteem parents are trying to create. Using her clinical experience, psychiatrist Robin Berman shows parents how they can take charge while building a loving family with deep connections. How children learn love and respect at home becomes the template for how they show love and respect in life. It’s a huge task, but Dr. Berman is your ally every step of the way. Every parent’s struggles are reflected (many of them comically), but so are heartwarming triumphs. Parents, teachers and children themselves recount turning points at which they figured out what great parenting looked like and the magic it unlocked. This engaging book—a perfect mix of medical research and inspirational anecdotes—just might be the key to being the parent you want to be and the parent your children need.
A children's board book about respecting body boundaries. Teaches babies, toddlers, and thoughtful parents that it is okay for kids to say no to hugs and kisses, and that what happens to a person's body is up to them. Inspired by the #MeToo movement, written by a mom, illustrated by a feminist artist, and successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter. Follows recommendations by child experts about allowing kids to decide when and how to offer affection to others. Helps young kids grow up confident in their bodies, comfortable with expressing physical boundaries, and respectful of the boundaries of others.
The mental well-being of children and adults is shockingly poor. Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel, knows why. And he knows what we can do. "We have a crisis on our hands, and its victims are our children." Marc Brackett is a professor in Yale University’s Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In his 25 years as an emotion scientist, he has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults – a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he’d endured. And that was the beginning of Marc’s awareness that what he was going through was temporary. He wasn’t alone, he wasn’t stuck on a timeline, and he wasn’t “wrong” to feel scared, isolated, and angry. Now, best of all, he could do something about it. In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional well-being. His prescription for healthy children (and their parents, teachers, and schools) is a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions that has already transformed the thousands of schools that have adopted it. RULER has been proven to reduce stress and burnout, improve school climate, and enhance academic achievement. This book is the culmination of Marc’s development of RULER and his way to share the strategies and skills with readers around the world. It is tested, and it works. This book combines rigor, science, passion and inspiration in equal parts. Too many children and adults are suffering; they are ashamed of their feelings and emotionally unskilled, but they don’t have to be. Marc Brackett’s life mission is to reverse this course, and this book can show you how.
An insatiable need for sex and love. Periods of overeating or starving. A pattern of unstable and painful relationships. Does this sound painfully familiar? Trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel has seen these traits over and over in clients who feel trapped in cycles of harmful behaviors-and are unable to stop. Many of us find ourselves stuck in unhealthy habits simply because we don't see a better way. With Mother Hunger, McDaniel helps women break the cycle of destructive behavior by taking a fresh look at childhood trauma and its lasting impact. In doing so, she destigmatizes the shame that comes with being under-mothered and misdiagnosed. McDaniel offers a healing path with powerful tools that include therapeutic interventions and lifestyle changes in service to healthy relationships. The constant search for mother love can be a lifelong emotional burden, but healing begins with knowing and naming what we are missing. McDaniel is the first clinician to identify Mother Hunger, which demystifies the search for love and provides the compass that each woman needs to end the struggle with achy, lonely emptiness, and come home to herself.
A grieving young woman learns something new about love from a dominatrix in this haunting and erotic debut. Echo is a failing actress who prefers to lose herself in the lives of others rather than examine her own. When her father disappears in a seaside misstep, she and her mother are left grief-stricken, unsure of how to piece back together their family that, it turns out, had never been whole. But then Orly -- a dominatrix -- moves in across the street. And through her, Echo begins to find the pieces that will allow her to carry on. Set among the bright colours and harshly glittering lights of Los Angeles, this is a love story about people addled with dreams and expectations who turn to the erotic for answers.
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.
A richly rewarding guide for women stepping into their full feminine power Pre-patriarchal cultures revered the passage from youth to maturity as a part of nature’s cycle. Yet, today’s society has largely severed women from this connection, asking them to remain young, pretty, and disconnected from their inner sacredness. Maiden to Mother offers a desperately needed pathway out of infantilization and disempowerment and into soul-sourced sovereign wholeness. Through story, ritual, and teaching, Wilson ushers women through the ancient passage of the immature “Maiden” phase of life and guides us through the crucial initiation into the archetypal Mother—the powerful, safe, compassionate, full-bloom feminine life force that exists within all of us. The Mother is every woman’s birthright, regardless of whether or not she raises children. It is an embodiment of who we needed as a child, who we were meant to be in this life, and who the world needs us to be now. Here, we are invited to dismantle our internalized conditioning with its false, constricting standards for the feminine, so that we may live with authenticity and feast on the richness of life. “Midlife is not, as our culture proposes, where a woman’s power ends,” says Wilson, “but where it really begins.”
In this classic work of women's history (winner of the 1984 Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology), Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows how and why modern women devote as much time to housework as did their colonial sisters. In lively and provocative prose, Cowan explains how the modern conveniences—washing machines, white flour, vacuums, commercial cotton—seemed at first to offer working-class women middle-class standards of comfort. Over time, however, it became clear that these gadgets and gizmos mainly replaced work previously conducted by men, children, and servants. Instead of living lives of leisure, middle-class women found themselves struggling to keep up with ever higher standards of cleanliness.
