Hell Is Other Parents

I read No Exit in my early twenties, and I remember thinking hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone ever actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape? Then I became a parent. From Deborah Copaken Kogan, the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Shutterbabe, comes this edgy, insightful, and sidesplitting memoir about surviving in the trenches of modern parenting. Kogan writes situation comedy in the style of David Sedaris and Spalding Gray with a dash of Erma-Bombeck-on-a-Vespa: wry, acutely observed, and often hilarious true tales, in which the narrator is as culpable as any character. In these eleven linked pieces, Kogan and her husband are almost always broke while working full-time and raising three children in New York City, one of the most expensive and competitive cities in the world. In one episode, exhausted from a particularly difficult childbirth, Kogan finds herself sharing a hospital room with a foul-mouthed teen mother and her partying posse. In another, Kogan manages to crawl her way to her own emergency appendectomy, which inconveniently strikes the same week her infant's babysitter is away on vacation, her adolescents are off from school, her New York Times editor needs his edit, and the whole family catches the flu. And in the book's capper essay, she drives twelve hours, solo, with a screaming toddler in a rent-a-car in a futile effort to catch a glimpse of her eldest child in his summer camp play. Yes, Shutterbabe is all grown up and slightly worse for the wear, but her clear-eyed vision while under fire has remained intact: You've never read funnier war stories.

The author discusses parenting as the greatest challenge of her life in a series of essays that describes her haphazard encounters with overprotective, competitive, and interfering fellow parents.

"A coming-of-age true story about what happens when you let your kids run feral--half Goodfellas, half Stand By Me, and three-quarters Dukes of Hazzard"--Page 4 of cover.

After searching high and low for the year's outstanding short fiction, Delia Falconer has selected masterful stories from some of the country's best-loved authors and exciting work from the up-and-coming. 'Stories don't have the novel's luxury of great swathes of time, its layerings, its wanderings, its counterpoints,' she observes. 'Instead, they must cut to the bone straightaway . . . Sometimes they capture a shift in a whole world; at other times they put into words a mood or tone that we might not have seen, until it appears so beautifully before us.' With their wry humour, quiet intensity and elegant economy, these stories display Australian writing at its diverse, unpredictable best.

The Problem with Parenting serves as an essential guide to the recent origins and current excesses of American parenting for students, parents, and policy makers interested in the changing role of the family in childrearing. Family scholarship focuses predominately on the evolution of family structure and function, with only passing references to parenting. Researchers who study parenting, however, invariably regard it as a sociological phenomenon with complex motivations rooted in such factors as class, economic instability, and new technologies. This book examines the relationship between changes to the family and the emergence of parenting, defined here as a specific mode of childrearing. It shows how, beginning in the 1970s, the family was transformed from a social unit that functioned as the primary institution for raising children into a vehicle for the nurturing and fulfillment of the self. The book pays special attention to socialization and describes how the change in our understanding of parenthood—from a state of being into the distinct activity of "parenting"—is indicative of a disruption of our ability to transfer key cultural values and norms from one generation to the next.

The second edition of Screenwise offers a refreshed, realistic, and optimistic perspective on how to thoughtfully guide kids in the digital age. Many parents feel that their kids are addicted, detached, or distracted because of their digital devices. Media expert Devorah Heitner, however, believes that technology offers huge potential to our children—if parents mentor them. Using the foundation of their own values and experiences, parents and educators can learn about the digital world to help set kids up for a lifetime of success in a world fueled by technology. Screenwise is a guide to understanding more about what it is like for children to grow up with technology all around them, and to recognizing the special challenges—and advantages—that contemporary kids and teens experience thanks to this level of connection. In it, Heitner presents practical parenting "hacks": quick ideas that you can implement today that will help you understand and relate to your digital native. The new edition includes updated material and additional strategies for parents and caretakers.

Written with humor and insight, this is a practical guide to avoiding the common pitfalls of divorce. In a clear and readable fashion, it describes what the courts can and cannot do, how to work effectively in the system, how to prepare for a custody evaluation, what to do when the other side goes for the throat, and how to find the best professionals to partner with. Filled with practical solutions to common divorce problems.