Intuitive Parenting

You already have everything you need to raise a healthy, happy, intelligent child Parenting today is practically a competitive sport, and marketers are all too happy to cash in. Scare tactics and scientific-sounding jargon make it seem like parents are in constant danger of hard-wiring their children’s brains for failure. In fact, this state of parental anxiety is totally unnecessary—and possibly bad for our children. Babies are born with an appetite to learn. Children are naturally curious about the world and eager to explore it. They don’t need flashcards, educational videos, or the latest iPad app to help speed their development. Attempts to get children speaking and reading before they’re developmentally ready may even harm them in the long run. In The Intuitive Parent, Vanderbilt University child development specialist Dr. Stephen Camarata debunks the claims many of these “brain development” programs make. Using accessible, down-to-earth language he explains how parents can intuitively support their child’s brain development by simply paying attention. Babies and children develop at their own pace; what’s more, they are hardwired to signal to caregivers when they’re ready for the next step. Restrictive tools like flashcards may derail your child’s ability to learn holistically—and will definitely sap the joy from one of the most important jobs in the world: being a parent. The key is to recognize the “ready to learn” cues your child is giving you and respond in a way that comes naturally. Routine activities, such as playing peekaboo, reading books to a toddler, talking, singing, feeding, and otherwise meeting the everyday needs of a child, are the true magic that ultimately wires a child’s brain and helps children become an intelligent, confident, curious, and talented adults. Grounded in the latest science by a nationally recognized child development expert, The Intuitive Parent arms parents and caregivers with the confidence and knowledge they need to quit worrying and enjoy the time they have with their child—no fancy gadgets or pricey videos necessary.

What if you could slow down, tap in, and pay attention to the clues and cues your children are giving you? Intuitive Parenting is an easy-to-use guide for parents and caregivers interested in improving communication with the children in their lives. Your children’s hearts are speaking—do you know how to listen? Dr. Debra Snyder, an intuitive therapist and holistic practitioner shares her groundbreaking guide to energy communication and healing, showing readers how to enhance their communication with children via subtle energy systems. Unlike other books on spiritual parenting that focus solely on changing the child, Intuitive Parenting works just as much on the parent’s growth and entire family dynamic. With exercises, journaling prompts, and interwoven client stories, the book will resonate with parents, caretakers, teachers, therapists, and holistic health practitioners how to foster communication at the heart level.

Reconnect with your parenting intuition and the innate wisdom it provides with simple, practical steps. Reduce stress and overwhelm, improve your confidence and your relationship with your child or children. 'In her wise book, Jennifer Day makes a powerful case for parental confidence . . . Intuitive Parenting offers practical strategies for overcoming the stresses of parenting and embracing our own inner capacities' - Daniel H. Pink, bestselling author of Drive Parents today are inundated with information and expert advice, often contradictory and invariably overwhelming. This results in anxiety, insecurity and stressed parenting that inevitably drives wedges between parents and children instead of the much-needed connection. This book offers swift, practical and to-the-point information to help you reconnect with your innate wisdom, giving you the confidence to trust your own parenting intuition. · Learn what gets in the way of connecting to your intuition and how to eliminate it · Discover the key - and underused - ingredient to your own parenting blueprint · Learn the three levels of influence you have on your child and how (and why) to align them · Discover the one simple tool to managing your stress - so easy your child can do it too · Learn how to give unspoken support and how to practice true listening The practical everyday applications this book offers will reduce your anxiety and help you to connect and be fully present with your child, improving relationships for you both.

With the wisdom of Intuitive Eating, a manifesto for parents to help them reject diet culture and raise the next generation to have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies. Kids are born intuitive eaters. Well-meaning parents, influenced by the diet culture that surrounds us all, are often concerned about how to best feed their children. Nearly everyone is talking about what to do about the childhood obesity epidemic. Meanwhile, every proposed solution for how to feed kids to promote health and prevent weight-related health concerns don’t mention the importance of one thing: a healthy relationship with food. The consequences can be disastrous and are indistinguishable from the predictable and well-researched impact that dieting has on adults. Weight cycling, low self-esteem, deviations from normal growth, and eating disorders are just some of the negative health effects children can experience from the fear-based approach to food and eating that has become the norm in our culture. Sumner Brooks and Amee Severson believe that parents want the best for their kids and know a parent’s job is to make them feel safe in the world and their bodies. They want them to grow up to be competent, healthy eaters, living their best lives in the bodies they were born to have. Intuitive Eating is more talked about than ever, and the time is now to make sure parents truly understand what it means to raise an intuitive eater. With a compassionate and relatable voice, How to Raise an Intuitive Eater is the only book of its kind to teach parents what they need to know to improve health, happiness, and wellbeing for the littlest among us.

Parents use music in family life to accomplish practical tasks, make relational connections, and guide their children's musical development. Parenting Musically portrays the musicking of eight diverse Cleveland-area families in home, school, and community settings. Themes from interviews focused on the families' hopes and dreams for their children musically, as well as the families' perceptions of media messages regarding parents and music, serve to deepen the documentation of how families use and perceive music in their daily lives. Family musical interactions are analyzed using the concepts of musical parenting (actions to support a child's musical development) and parenting musically (using music to accomplish extra-musical parenting goals), arguing the importance of recognizing and valuing both modes. An additional construct, practical/relational musicking, adds to the detailed analysis of family musical engagement. Practical musicking refers to musicking for a practical purpose, such as learning a scale or passing the time in a car; relational musicking is musicking that deepens relationships with self, siblings, parents, or community members, such as a grandmother singing to her grandchildren via Facetime as a way to feel connected. Families who embraced both practical and relational musicking expressed satisfaction in long-term musical involvement. Weaving together themes of conscious and intuitive parenting, the rewards and struggles of musical practice, and the role of mutuality in community musicking, the discussion draws on research in music education, psychology, family studies, and sociology. This book serves to highlight the multi-faceted nature of families' engagement in music; the author urges music education practitioners and administrators to consider this diversity when approaching curricular decisions. Written in a style accessible to laypersons, this book will interest a wide range of music educators as well as families, community members, and scholars and practitioners in family studies, psychology, and sociology.

Part of the authoritative four-volume reference that spans the entire field of child development and has set the standard against which all other scholarly references are compared. Updated and revised to reflect the new developments in the field, the Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition contains new chapters on such topics as spirituality, social understanding, and non-verbal communication. Volume 4: Child Psychology in Practice, edited by K. Ann Renninger, Swarthmore College, and Irving E. Sigel, Educational Testing Service, covers child psychology in clinical and educational practice. New topics addressed include educational assessment and evaluation, character education, learning disabilities, mental retardation, media and popular culture, children's health and parenting.

This highly anticipated third edition of the Handbook of Parenting brings together an array of field-leading experts who have worked in different ways toward understanding the many diverse aspects of parenting. Contributors to the Handbook look to the most recent research and thinking to shed light on topics every parent, professional, and policymaker wonders about. Parenting is a perennially "hot" topic. After all, everyone who has ever lived has been parented, and the vast majority of people become parents themselves. No wonder bookstores house shelves of "how-to" parenting books, and magazine racks in pharmacies and airports overflow with periodicals that feature parenting advice. However, almost none of these is evidence-based. The Handbook of Parenting is. Period. Each chapter has been written to be read and absorbed in a single sitting, and includes historical considerations of the topic, a discussion of central issues and theory, a review of classical and modern research, and forecasts of future directions of theory and research. Together, the five volumes in the Handbook cover Children and Parenting, the Biology and Ecology of Parenting, Being and Becoming a Parent, Social Conditions and Applied Parenting, and the Practice of Parenting. Volume 2, Biology and Ecology of Parenting, relates parenting to its biological roots and sets parenting in its ecological framework. Some aspects of parenting are influenced by the organic makeup of human beings, and the chapters in Part I, on the Biology of Parenting, examine the evolution of parenting, the psychobiological determinants of parenting in nonhumans, and primate parenting, as well as the genetic, prenatal, neuroendocrinological, and neurobiological bases of human parenting. A deep understanding of what it means to parent also depends on the ecologies in which parenting takes place. Beyond the nuclear family, parents are embedded in, influence, and are themselves affected by larger social systems. The chapters in Part II, on the Ecology of Parenting, examine the ancient and modern histories of parenting as well as epidemiology, neighborhoods, educational attainment, socioeconomic status, culture, and environment to provide an overarching relational developmental contextual systems perspective on parenting.