Proven Strategies to Parent With Confidence
You might have heard it from your own parents: We did the best we could, but it's not like there's a book on parenting!
While the oft-mentioned phrase is well-meaning and a sign of humility I still can't help but chuckle as a marriage and family therapist.
There's many great books on parenting! And I've read lots of them! Here are three I recommend to parents:
Tricia Ferrara's Parenting 2.0 is the antidote to a rapidly changing world of social media, childhood aggression, and mental health issues we hadn't imagined when we were growing up. Ferrara utilizes her clinical experience, the latest studies in neuroscience, and well-established norms in behavioral and developmental sciences to explore best-practices for raising children. The book is a slim read and what I enjoy most about it is its focus on developmental stages. Just when you've mastered those "terrible twos" they've grown out of them and it's time to adapt to the next phase of your child's lifespan. Available on Amazon.
The Conscious Parent's Guide Series. I can't say enough about The Conscious Parent's Guide series of books. Simon & Schuster employ experts in the field of mental health to write on a wide variety of subjects. Their guides specifically address: Raising Girls, Raising Boys, Gender Identity, Co-parenting, Positive Discipline, Executive Functioning Disorder, Childhood Anxiety, Autism, Asperger's Syndrome, and ADHD. These are highly readable, beautifully formatted books. I've bought them several times over because I can't help but allow my clients to keep them after they've found such usefulness out of them.
Jennifer Senior's All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. Many books address the effects of parents on their children, but what about the other way around? Senior mines history, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology to give a voice to the lived experiences of parents. The book explores the common frustrations and radical transformations adults go through when they have children and I find it normalizes the vexations that many parents are afraid to vocalize. NPR provides an excellent review and interview with the author available here.
I'm always on the lookout for books to recommend to my clients. Be sure to tell me your favorites!
