One adoption social worker called In On It "the adoption book for everyone else": the grandparents and friends, neighbors and colleagues, aunts and uncles, teachers and caregivers of adoptive families. In On It contains helpful advice and instructive anecdotes from adoptive parents, adult adoptees, adoption professionals, and the friends and relatives of already established adoptive families. The author, an adoptive parent herself, has written an informative, friendly and very useful adoption guide that informs and enlightens readers even as it offers them a warm welcome into adoption.
Parentless Parents is the first book to show how the absence of grandparents impacts everything about the way mothers and fathers raise their children--from everyday parenting decisions to the relationships they have with their spouses and in-laws. For the first time in U.S. history, as the average age of women giving birth has increased significantly, millions of children are at risk of having fewer years with their grandparents than ever before. How has this substantial shift affected parents and kids? Journalist, award-winning television producer, and parentless parent Allison Gilbert has polled and studied more than 1,300 parentless parents from across the United States and a dozen other countries to find out. Through her pioneering research, Gilbert not only shares her own story and the significant and poignant effect that this trend has had on her and hundreds of other families, but also the myriad ways these mothers and fathers have learned to keep the memory of their parents alive for their children, and to find the support and understanding they need.
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.
"No one book resolves a lifetime of hurts and misunderstandings, but it can remove the blinders from our eyes. Make an effort now." LOS ANGELES TIMES No matter how old you are and whether or not your parents are alive, you have to come to terms with them. This wise and practical book will show you how to deal with the most fundamental relationships in your life and, in the process, become the happy, creative, and fulfilled person you are meant to be.
Our children mean the world to us. They are so central to our hopes and dreams that we will do almost anything to keep them healthy, happy, and safe. What happens, then, when a child has serious problems? In Family Trouble, a compelling portrait of upheaval in family life, sociologist Ara Francis tells the stories of middle-class men and women whose children face significant medical, psychological, and social challenges. Francis interviewed the mothers and fathers of children with such problems as depression, bi-polar disorder, autism, learning disabilities, drug addiction, alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Children’s problems, she finds, profoundly upset the foundations of parents’ everyday lives, overturning taken-for-granted expectations, daily routines, and personal relationships. Indeed, these problems initiated a chain of disruption that moved through parents’ lives in domino-like fashion, culminating in a crisis characterized by uncertainty, loneliness, guilt, grief, and anxiety. Francis looks at how mothers and fathers often differ in their interpretation of a child’s condition, discusses the gendered nature of child rearing, and describes how parents struggle to find effective treatments and to successfully navigate medical and educational bureaucracies. But above all, Family Trouble examines how children’s problems disrupt middle-class dreams of the “normal” family. It captures how children’s problems “radiate” and spill over into other areas of parents’ lives, wreaking havoc even on their identities, leading them to reevaluate deeply held assumptions about their own sense of self and what it means to achieve the good life. Engagingly written, Family Trouble offers insight to professionals and solace to parents. The book offers a clear message to anyone in the throes of family trouble: you are in good company, and you are not as different as you might feel...
Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.
From one of the world's leading experts, this absorbing narrative history of the changing structure of modern families shows how children can flourish in any kind of loving home. The past few decades have seen extraordinary change in the idea of a family. The unit once understood to include two straight parents and their biological children has expanded vastly—same-sex marriage, adoption, IVF, sperm donation, and other forces have enabled new forms to take shape. This has resulted in enormous upheaval and controversy, but as Susan Golombok shows in this compelling and important book, it has also meant the health and happiness of parents and children alike. Golombok's stories, drawn from decades of research, are compelling and dramatic: family secrets kept for years and then inadvertently revealed; children reunited with their biological parents or half siblings they never knew existed; and painful legal battles to determine who is worthy of parenting their own children. Golombok explores the novel moral questions that changing families create, and ultimately makes a powerful argument that the bond between family members, rather than any biological or cultural factor, is what ensures a safe and happy future. We Are Family is unique, authoritative, and deeply humane. It makes an important case for all families—old, new, and yet unimagined.
From Dr. Patricia Love, a ground-breaking work that identifies, explores and treats the harmful effects that emotionally and psychologically invasive parents have on their children, and provides a program for overcoming the chronic problems that can result.
