Imperfect Parenting

As parents, we often worry we're making the wrong decisions. The good news is, having a strong relationship with your child means you can make a parenting blunder from time to time, and exercise grace and patience to try again. Written for parents of children from birth to young adulthood (ages 0-24), this book helps you examine your role as a guide, cheerleader, advocate, and most importantly, as a human being who doesn't always have the right answers. While your child's brain, body, emotions, and social abilities develop over time, author Dona Matthews shows how your skills as a parent can be developed too, by practicing relationship fundamentals such as acceptance, positivity, social support, boundaries, respect, self-care, and gratitude. Rooted in the latest findings from neuroscience and psychology, this book presents a model of authoritative parenting that embraces imperfection. Each chapter focuses on a key relationship skill for parenting, with tips on how to practice it during different stages of your child's growth and in common stressful situations such as social, school, health, and family scenarios.

Proven Methods for Understanding Children, Improving Family Communication and Raising Self-Confident and Resilient Kids by parenting expert Dr Mary O' Kane.

The world's finest parenting cartoon featuring ducks presents a comprehensive view of the early parenting years in all of their maddening cuteness and sanity-depriving chaos. In addition to dozens of previously unpublished cartoons, Fowl Language: Winging It is organized into 12 thematic chapters—including "Babies: Oh Dear God, What Have We Done?"; "Siblings: Best Frenemies Forever"; and "Sleep: Everybody Needs It, Nobody's Gettin' It"—each of which begins with a hilarious, illustrated 500-word essay.

As parents, we want to shape our children into emotionally mature and healthy human beings. But we cannot effectively shape our children's emotional well-being until we've addressed our own traumas and emotional needs. In It Starts with You, marriage and family therapist and parent coach Nicole Schwarz offers a nonjudgmental, shame-free guide to parenting children with a calm confidence. Working from a place of grace and compassion, she encourages us to explore how our history, thoughts, and assumptions impact our parenting decisions. Moving away from traditional discipline strategies, Schwarz focuses on the importance of having a calm brain, connected relationships, respectful conversations, and a coaching mindset with our kids. It Starts with You lays out a five-step process you can turn to whenever you're stuck in a difficult parenting situation. Each step is grounded in research and presented in a way that is easy to understand. Rather than adding unnecessary pressure, we learn that kids do not need perfect parents, but parents who are willing to learn, grow, and move forward with them in a positive direction.

Syler explains how she learned to chuck perfection for practicality, offering sage advice and tips on navigating different obstacles while offering real wisdom about mothering that is tempered with humor and warmth.

Parents want to be the best person they can for their children, but much of the time they may feel like giraffes on ice--clumsy, unprepared, and in imminent danger of going down. The good news is, our children don't need perfect parents. They need authentic, fully-hearted, relationally engaged parents who can mess up and move on more than parents who always get it right. In this freeing book, respected therapists and bestselling authors Stephen James and Chip Dodd invite parents to let go of perfectionism and micromanaging as they learn to parent from a place of emotional honesty and intimacy. Through their clinical experience and relatable true stories, they show parents that raising children to become capable, loving, and wise-hearted adults is far more about accepting our flaws than projecting an impossible standard to our children that we already know we can't live up to. Parents will learn how to resolve issues from their own childhoods, tune into their feelings and the emotions of their children, and be present with their families through both the best and worst of circumstances.

Connections Curriculum

Researcher and thought leader Dr. Brené Brown offers a powerful new vision in Daring Greatly that encourages us to embrace vulnerability and imperfection, to live wholeheartedly and courageously. 'It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly' -Theodore Roosevelt Every time we are introduced to someone new, try to be creative, or start a difficult conversation, we take a risk. We feel uncertain and exposed. We feel vulnerable. Most of us try to fight those feelings - we strive to appear perfect. Challenging everything we think we know about vulnerability, Dr. Brené Brown dispels the widely accepted myth that it's a weakness. She argues that vulnerability is in fact a strength, and when we shut ourselves off from revealing our true selves we grow distanced from the things that bring purpose and meaning to our lives. Daring Greatly is the culmination of 12 years of groundbreaking social research, across the home, relationships, work, and parenting. It is an invitation to be courageous; to show up and let ourselves be seen, even when there are no guarantees. This is vulnerability. This is daring greatly. 'Brilliantly insightful. I can't stop thinking about this book' -Gretchen Rubin Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Her groundbreaking work was featured on Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul Sunday, NPR, and CNN. Her TED talk is one of the most watched TED talks of all time. Brené is also the author of The Gifts of Imperfection and I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't).