The Natural Child

Discover an age-old parenting method that treats children with dignity, respect, understanding, and compassion from infancy into adulthood. The Natural Child makes a compelling case for a return to attachment parenting, a child-rearing approach that has come naturally for parents throughout most of human history. In this insightful guide, parenting specialist Jan Hunt links together attachment parenting principles with child advocacy and homeschooling philosophies, offering a consistent approach to raising a loving, trusting, and confident child. The Natural Child dispels the myths of “tough love,” building baby’s self-reliance by ignoring its cries, and the necessity of spanking to enforce discipline. Instead, the book explains the value of extended breast-feeding, family co-sleeping, and minimal child-parent separation. Homeschooling, like attachment parenting, nurtures feelings of self-worth, confidence, and trust. The author draws on respected leaders of the homeschool movement such as John Taylor Gatto and John Holt, guiding the reader through homeschool approaches that support attachment parenting principles. Being an ally to children is spontaneous for caring adults, but intervening on behalf of a child can be awkward and surrounded by social taboo. The Natural Child shows how to stand up for a child’s rights effectively and sensitively in many difficult situations. The role of caring adults, points out Hunt, is not to give children “lessons in life”—but to employ a variation of The Golden Rule, and treat children as we would like to have been treated in childhood. Praise for The Natural Child “I had grown jaded with the flood of parenting books, but The Natural Child is a rare and splendid exception . . . . I can’t praise it sufficiently, and would place it along with Leidloff’s Continuum Concept and my own Magical Child . . . . It could make an enormous difference if read widely enough.” —Joseph Chilton Pierce, author of The Magical Child “In prose that is at the same time eloquent and simple, [Hunt] provides a mix of useful parenting tips that are supported by the philosophy that children reflect the treatment they receive. This is no less than an impassioned plea for the future—not only our children’s future, but the future of our way oof life on this planet.” —Wendy Priesnitz, Editor, Natural Life Magazine

It shouldn't hurt to be a child!

Krys Malcolm Belc's visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood—conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding his son Samson—eventually clarified his gender identity. Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner, Anna, adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as “the natural mother of the child.” By considering how the experiences contained under the umbrella of “motherhood” don’t fully align with Belc’s own experience, The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family. With this visual memoir in essays, Belc has created a new kind of life record, one that engages directly with the documentation often thought to constitute a record of one’s life—childhood photos, birth certificates—and addresses his deep ambivalence about the “before” and “after” so prevalent in trans stories, which feels apart from his own experience. The Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative, with prose that delights in the intimate dailiness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.

Kinder, Gentler, and It Really Works Based on the human rest and activity cycle that occurs every hour and a half, here’s a scientifically based program for parents to help babies get all the sleep they need, both through the night and during the day. The method is simple, foolproof, and yields long-lasting results: truly restful daytime naps (which also gives an infant a head start on cognitive development and emotional intelligence) and consistent nighttime sleep—as beneficial for parents as it is for the baby. For babies aged two weeks to one year Lessons in sleep independence and solutions to common problems, such as your baby waking up too early, getting a second wind before bedtime, confusing day and night, and more Includes a guided journal for recording your baby’s sleep signals and keeping track of naps and bedtimes A simple program for sleep that delivers foolproof results.

“The children and nature movement is fueled by this fundamental idea: the child in nature is an endangered species, and the health of children and the health of the Earth are inseparable.” —Richard Louv, from the new edition In his landmark work Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv brought together cutting-edge studies that pointed to direct exposure to nature as essential for a child’s healthy physical and emotional development. Now this new edition updates the growing body of evidence linking the lack of nature in children’s lives and the rise in obesity, attention disorders, and depression. Louv’s message has galvanized an international back-to-nature campaign to “Leave No Child Inside.” His book will change the way you think about our future and the future of our children. “[The] national movement to ‘leave no child inside’ . . . has been the focus of Capitol Hill hearings, state legislative action, grass-roots projects, a U.S. Forest Service initiative to get more children into the woods and a national effort to promote a ‘green hour’ in each day. . . . The increased activism has been partly inspired by a best-selling book, Last Child in the Woods, and its author, Richard Louv.” —The Washington Post “Last Child in the Woods, which describes a generation so plugged into electronic diversions that it has lost its connection to the natural world, is helping drive a movement quickly flourishing across the nation.” —The Nation’s Health “This book is an absolute must-read for parents.” —The Boston Globe Now includes A Field Guide with 100 Practical Actions We Can Take Discussion Points for Book Groups, Classrooms, and Communities Additional Notes by the Author New and Updated Research from the U.S. and Abroad

An exciting new perspective on raising children--featuring invaluable insights into a child's point of view and a breakthrough look at the spiritual dimension of childhood. Thomson discusses how to stimulate a child's creative potential, how to find the educational style that suits a child, and more. 87 full-color and black-and-white photos. 114 line drawings.

All children are born with emotional talent. If left untended, those talents can wane during the first five years of life. The text focuses on children's readiness for learning. It addresses the natural joy explicit in children's early conversations and engagement with music and their development through play with both adults and other children.