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In this "refreshingly relatable" (Outside) memoir, perfect for the self-isolating family, Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his family on a journey around the world to change their lives together. What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family? Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family-Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters-could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together? In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home-but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble. HOW TO BE A FAMILY brings readers along as the Kois girls-witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper-like through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go? A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, HOW TO BE A FAMILY will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.
Margaret Shaw explores how babies can be welcomed onto this earth with warmth, love, insight, joy, rhythm, structure and sensitive care. This helps lay healthy physical, psychological and spiritual foundations for life. The book follows the incarnating process of the child, starting before conception through the first three years of the family up to the third birthday.
Expanding on the stories in her popular column for the website Waging Nonviolence, Berrigan has crafted a welcome antidote to the various parenting fads currently on offer from French moms and tiger moms and mean moms. She offers a unique perspective on parenting that derives from hard work, deep reflection, and lots of trial and error.
The movement from young adulthood through coupling and the transition to parenthood may be among the most universal adult developmental transitions. These passages hold interest for all of us, but especially for those who study the psychological, familial, and sociocultural components of development, all of which interact and influence each other. This book enhances understanding of family-life development by shedding light on the meanings that family members ascribe to the developmental process of becoming a family. This is achieved through qualitative analysis of narratives through which individuals and families explain themselves, their thinking, and their behavior. These family narratives are windows into individual and family identity, as well as descriptions of connections to others. The book addresses issues including identity, child characteristics, social support, and work. Each chapter includes a review of seminal literature, parents' comments and ideas about the topic, and a discussion of practice, policy, and research implications.
Every family has relational habits—both positive and negative—passed down from generation to generation. Family counselor Beverly Hubble Tauke, citing real-life stories and suggesting specific “transforming practices,” shows how to put an end to a cycle of negativity and change family patterns so that you and your family can enjoy healthy relationships for generations to come. Full of surprising wit and inspiring insight, "Sins of the Family" will help families find the joy God intended for them.
"Recommended: Childbirth educators"--Cover.
It is a story that moves us to tears. An American couple travels across the world to rescue a child from the hopelessness of a foreign orphanage, bringing their new son or daughter to a life of love and family. But does this transition always go smoothly? Adoptive parents hope their child will easily fit into the family and quickly become emotionally connected to the parents or siblings. But child psychologists and adoption experts say this connection is the most difficult aspect of international adoption. In countries where international adoptions are common-China, Russia, or Romania-orphanages commonly represent the available children to their new parents as healthy kids who just need a little love. In many cases, this is a gross misrepresentation. Children who spend time in institutionalized care may have experienced trauma, and therefore may not attach easily to their new family. Parents anxious to bring these children into their homes and their hearts struggle seriously with this issue. Although these children will eventually adapt in a healthy fashion, the road to emotional health and harmony can be a rocky one. Becoming a Family tackles this intricate issue head on. It provides parents with effective strategies for ensuring that their adopted child adjusts as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Practical and accessible, this book will help parents identify severe problems before the adoption, significantly reduce the risk of future difficulty, improve the damage already done to the child's otherwise normal, healthy development, and dramatically help enfold the child into a family ready to give love, security, and a new life.
In this book, Ray S. Anderson, a pastor theologian, and Dennis B. Guernsey, a family sociologist, explore the connections that produce the marvelous, complicated and often contorted human family. The central thesis of the book is that God has placed human persons in a created order for which the covenant love of God provides the fundamental paradigm for parenting, sexuality, and marriage, and the formation of family life. From the perspective of the church as the new family of God, the human family is liberated from its own failures and fears, and each person is affirmed as having a place in God's kingdom. Through Jesus Christ, to whom we are connected by grace, we are all brothers and sisters. We are family.
Moving into parenthood is typically a time of great joy and excitement, but it also brings fatigue, stress, and conflict. From the authors of the best-selling Fighting for Your Marriage and A Lasting Promise, this unique and innovative guide offers indispensable advice on how to protect and preserve your marriage and take care of yourselves as you become parents. Based on scientific research and containing real-life examples, Becoming Parents challenges you to seize this opportunity to really thrive in your relationship and in parenting together as a team. "If you're having a baby, buy this book! It will give your baby the most important gift of all-parents who know how to keep their relationship happy, satisfying, and stable-the kind of relationship your baby can count on and learn from." --Diane Sollee, director, Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education
What determines whether stepfamilies remain together? What helps stepfamilies overcomes the difficulties of remarriage and become mutually supportive family units? How can mental health professionals better support this development? This book brings both clarity and depth to the unique and complex dynamics of remarried families. Patricia Papernow draws on interviews with over 100 stepfamily members, up-to-date research, a solid theoretical framework, and an empathic clinical sensibility to present an insightful model of stepfamily development, the Stepfamily Cycle. This details account of the sages of forming a lasting, cohesive group is richly illustrated by stepfamily members' own stories. Becoming a Stepfamily describes the developmental challenges involved in building nourishing, reliable relationships between stepparents and stepchildren, in the newly married couple, and between different family groups who must learn to live together in a remarried family. Papernow discusses the factors that influence the pace and ease of development, and she provides four full length case studies illustrating the varied paths through the stepfamily cycle to the successful remarried life. The author offers therapists, clergy, school personnel, and others involved with stepfamilies a range of effective interventions, including preventive, educational, and clinical approaches. She provides practical guidance for helping family members deal constructively with the differing attachments of children to their biological parents and stepparents, assisting stepparents as they cope with feeling excluded from the powerful biological parent-child bond, and guiding biological parents torn between their spouse's need for intimacy and privacy and their children's needs for support and attention.