Boymom

This guidebook, packed with wisdom, practical advice, resources, and encouragement, explores how moms can equip their sons with what they most need to succeed in life. Monica Swanson knew she'd tapped a heartfelt concern when nearly two million readers shared her blog post "What a Teenage Boy Needs Most from His Mom." In this helpful book, she takes mothers deeper into the insights they need for the boy-raising journey, covering topics from dealing with the daily influences of friends and technology to helping a boy grow to be physically, spiritually, and emotionally healthy. She also addresses learning and finding passions, perspectives on relationships and dating, and work ethics and money management. Each chapter features relatable stories, handy checklists, and practical advice based on a combination of research, experience, and biblical truth to guide and equip a mom in helping her son achieve his God-given potential. Praise for Boy Mom “In Boy Mom Monica Swanson offers readers practical advice and resounding hope that parenting our sons well through all seasons is not only possible but also enjoyable. This book is like an essential trail guide that I’ll refer to again and again in the beautiful and challenging adventure of motherhood.”—Becky Keife, author of No Better Mom for the Job and mom of three spirited boys “Monica Swanson is the friend we all need in our lives: humble, straightforward, warm, full of wisdom, and short on nonsense—and she knows her stuff like no one else. In Boy Mom she holds the bar high yet is forthcoming about her own struggles and imperfections. Inside these pages you’ll find deeply rooted biblical and practical advice along with calls to action when you don’t know where to start. The Boy Mom Manifesto at the end will not only inspire you but also make your heart swell.”—Kate Merrick, author of Here, Now: Unearthing Peace and Presence in an Overconnected World “Monica Swanson is the ultimate Boy Mom mentor. While her perspective on parenting is grounded in biblical wisdom, each chapter holds excellent practical tools for how to work out that wisdom on a daily basis in our homes. Of course, we know there aren’t formulas that will ensure we get it all right, but we also know that gleaning wisdom from women who have gone before us (and are still in the trenches with us) is invaluable in the wonderful adventure of helping boys become all God created them to be.”—Jeannie Cunnion, author of Mom Set Free

Combining painfully honest memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment. “Rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters. Trying to raise good sons suddenly felt like a hopeless task.” As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been politicized from all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman finds herself conflicted and scared. While the right pushes a dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, her feminist peers often dismiss boys as little more than entitled predators-in-waiting. Meanwhile her home life feels like a daily confrontation with the triumph of nature over nurture. With young men in the grip of a loneliness epidemic and dying by suicide at a rate of nearly four times their female peers, Whippman asks: How do we raise our sons to have a healthy sense of self without turning them into privileged assholes? How can we find a feminism that holds boys to a higher standard but still treats them with empathy? And what do we do when our boys won’t cooperate with our plans? Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures boys now face; and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and adrift. Feminist gonzo-style, she spends months interviewing incels, reports on a conference for boys accused of sexual assault; crashes at a residential therapy center for young men in Utah, talks to a wide range of psychologists and other experts, and gets boys of all backgrounds to open up about sex, consent, porn, body image, mental health, cancel culture, screens, friendship and loneliness. Along the way, she finds her simple certainties about male privilege seriously challenged. With wit, honesty, and a refusal to settle for easy answers, BoyMom charts a new path to give boys a healthier, more expansive, and fulfilling story about their own lives.

From author and speaker Melanie Dale comes a laugh-out-loud hilarious parenting book that teaches you how to dial back the stress of raising children with the simple premise that we all just need to lighten up a little bit. Most of us thought we’d be amazing parents—and then we had kids. Now we spend what little free time we have comparing ourselves to other parents, comparing our kids to other kids, and panicking that everyone else is nailing it except us. Between constant social media postings to conflicting advice found in parenting books, we often have no choice but to freak out. But there is another way. We all just need to calm the h*ck down. Melanie Dale—a special needs parent, adoptive parent, in vitro parent, and reluctant cheer mom—believes we are all putting too much pressure on ourselves and our kids to be perfect. Instead, she argues, we need to take a step back so we can actually enjoy this journey called parenting. Calm the H*ck Down is filled with stories from Melanie’s own life, as well as real-life research for learning how to lighten up about every aspect of parenting—from poopy diapers and germs to family vacations and adolescent angst. She also discusses the pressure to knock it all out of the Pinterest park, the challenge of instilling some kind of faith into your kids, and worrying about their future while still trying to live in the present. Infused with quirky humor, profound insight, and accessible advice, Calm the H*ck Down gives you the permission to finally relax and enjoy this ridiculous thing we do called parenting.

"Haunting ... teems with raw emotion, and McCullough deftly captures the experience of learning to behave in a male-driven society and then breaking outside of it."—The New Yorker "I will be haunted and empowered by Artemisia Gentileschi's story for the rest of my life."—Amanda Lovelace, bestselling author of the princess saves herself in this one A William C. Morris Debut Award Finalist 2018 National Book Award Longlist Her mother died when she was twelve, and suddenly Artemisia Gentileschi had a stark choice: a life as a nun in a convent or a life grinding pigment for her father's paint. She chose paint. By the time she was seventeen, Artemisia did more than grind pigment. She was one of Rome's most talented painters, even if no one knew her name. But Rome in 1610 was a city where men took what they wanted from women, and in the aftermath of rape Artemisia faced another terrible choice: a life of silence or a life of truth, no matter the cost. He will not consume my every thought. I am a painter. I will paint. Joy McCullough's bold novel in verse is a portrait of an artist as a young woman, filled with the soaring highs of creative inspiration and the devastating setbacks of a system built to break her. McCullough weaves Artemisia's heartbreaking story with the stories of the ancient heroines, Susanna and Judith, who become not only the subjects of two of Artemisia's most famous paintings but sources of strength as she battles to paint a woman's timeless truth in the face of unspeakable and all-too-familiar violence. I will show you what a woman can do. ★"A captivating and impressive."—Booklist, starred review ★"Belongs on every YA shelf."—SLJ, starred review ★"Haunting."—Publishers Weekly, starred review ★"Luminous."—Shelf Awareness, starred review

Families with boys often find the world reacts to them in mock horror. Even though parents love their sons, privately they admit that boys can be a handful to raise--they are boisterous, competitive, reckless, distractable. The challenge of wills between parent and son starts early, and the quest to civilize young bulls may seem hopeless some days. Yet believers know that God has given them children as a gift of heaven, specially chosen for their particular families and marked as a blessing. If that's so, why does it seem so hard? How can we prepare these boys to serve God when it's all we can do to make it through another day? Isn't there a better way? Raising Real Men: Surviving, Teaching and Appreciating Boys shows the answer is emphatically yes. Written by the parents of six boys, Raising Real Men provides hope and encouragement to families with sons. Starting from the premise that God made boys to become men, Hal and Melanie Young offer Biblical principles and tested, practical ideas for training the manly virtues that can drive parents and teachers up the wall. This is a practical guide to equipping the hearts and minds of boys without breaking or losing your own. "...earthy, realistic, humorous, and scriptural ..." -- Douglas Wilson, author, Future Men "This is just what the doctor ordered for parents who want to raise capable Christian men of character." -- John Rosemond, author, Parenting By The Book

NAMED ONE OF THE 40 BEST BOOKS OF 2016 BY THE NEW YORK POST A New York Times Editor's Choice pick “Ruth Whippman is my new favorite cultural critic...a shrewd, hilarious analysis.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B (coauthored with Sheryl Sandberg) "I don't think I've enjoyed cultural observations this much since David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Reading this book is like touring America with a scary-smart friend who can't stop elbowing you in the ribs and saying, "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?!" If you want to understand why our culture incites pure dread and alienation in so many of us (often without always recognizing it), read this book." —Heather Havrilesky, writer behind "Ask Polly" for New York Magazine and nationally bestselling author of How to Be a Person in the World Are you happy? Right now? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could you be happier if you tried harder? After she packed up her British worldview (that most things were basically rubbish) and moved to America, journalist and documentary filmmaker Ruth Whippman found herself increasingly perplexed by the American obsession with one topic above all others: happiness. The subject came up everywhere: at the playground swings, at the meat counter in the supermarket, and even—legs in stirrups—at the gynecologist. The omnipresence of these happiness conversations (trading tips, humble-bragging successes, offering unsolicited advice) wouldn’t let her go, and so Ruth did some digging. What she found was a paradox: despite the fact that Americans spend more time and money in search of happiness than any other nation on earth, research shows that the United States is one of the least contented, most anxious countries in the developed world. Stoked by a multi-billion dollar “happiness industrial complex” intent on selling the promise of bliss, America appeared to be driving itself crazy in pursuit of contentment. So Ruth set out to get to the bottom of this contradiction, embarking on an uproarious pilgrimage to investigate how this national obsession infiltrates all areas of life, from religion to parenting, the workplace to academia. She attends a controversial self-help course that promises total transformation, where she learns all her problems are all her own fault; visits a “happiness city” in the Nevada desert and explores why it has one of the highest suicide rates in America; delves into the darker truths behind the influential academic “positive psychology movement”; and ventures to Utah to spend time with the Mormons, officially America’s happiest people. What she finds, ultimately, and presents in America the Anxious, is a rigorously researched yet universal answer, and one that comes absolutely free of charge.

"God, I need you to do something in my children!" Have those words found their way into your desperate prayers? Do you feel helpless to know how to equip your children for this world and all it throws at them? If so, you're not alone. When Brooke McGlothlin realized her best efforts were falling woefully short of her goal to produce godly children, she discovered the joy and power of praying Scripture over her family. Her life and her children's lives were transformed. Yours can be too. Complete with prayers for specific situations, this encouraging book is perfect for times when you · feel too busy to pray, · don't know what or how to pray, · don't know if your prayers really matter. Nothing is more powerful and faith-building than praying God's Word for those you love. Become a mom full of hope in the God who can, even if you can't. "Praying Mom is the prayer mentor you've always wanted from a mom who absolutely lives this message on her knees."--STACEY THACKER, author of Threadbare Prayer

A young woman holds her newborn son And looks at him lovingly. Softly she sings to him: "I'll love you forever I'll like you for always As long as I'm living My baby you'll be." So begins the story that has touched the hearts of millions worldwide. Since publication in l986, Love You Forever has sold more than 15 million copies in paperback and the regular hardcover edition (as well as hundreds of thousands of copies in Spanish and French). Firefly Books is proud to offer this sentimental favorite in a variety of editions and sizes: We offer a trade paper and laminated hardcover edition in a 8" x 8" size. In gift editions we carry: a slipcased edition (8 1/2" x 8 1/4"), with a laminated box and a cloth binding on the book and a 10" x 10" laminated hardcover with jacket. And a Big Book Edition, 16" x 16" with a trade paper binding.