Stepparenting Is Hard...but It Can Also Be Richly Rewarding Stepparenting can sometimes feel like an overwhelming and thankless challenge. Loving and caring for children who aren't biologically yours means having to earn trust, establish authority, and often put your own needs aside in favor of your stepchild's well-being or a birth parent's wishes. But here's the good news: With some expert guidance and God's help, you can have tremendous influence in your stepchild's life and grow in your faith along the way. Seasoned stepmom Laurie Polich Short understands and empathizes with the difficult job you face. Drawing on extensive research, biblical teaching, and her own real-life experience (including an insightful chapter cowritten with her stepson, Jordan), Laurie provides practical and spiritual advice to help you fully embrace and succeed in your role as stepparent. Whether you are about to become a stepparent or are further along on your journey, this compassionate and insightful resource offers the hope, help, and encouragement you've been looking for.

"...incredible opportunities to help your husband become the hero your children need." -Dannah Gresh Every dad wants to lead his family with wisdom, strength, love, and laughter. An astute mom-like you-can make a huge difference when it comes to making that happen. With Moms Bringing Out the Best in Dads, you'll learn how to applaud and affirm the unique role a dad plays in his children's lives and hearts. This book will encourage you to... work and communicate with your husband to protect, shepherd, and empower your kids nudge, sweet-talk, and motivate each other on this mission that must not fail understand and appreciate your husband's unique talents as a father-and identify how your own gifts can serve as a complement You can do this...together! Moms Bringing Out the Best in Dads is a heartfelt celebration of the loving dads who are excited to invest in their families, and the self-assured moms who inspire their husbands to become the fathers they've always wanted to be.

The perfect book for your daddy's birthday, Father's Day, a new father, or for giving and sharing any time you want to say I love you daddy. Join the PAW Patrol in this celebration of heroic daddies and see how kind, funny, clever and adventurous daddies are. From saving the day and cheering you up, to playing lots of games and being a bit clumsy, daddies are fun to be around - just like the PAW Patrol. Show your daddy just how much he means to you and add your own words to the story to make an extra special gift. The perfect way to say, 'I love you daddy'.

The most fundamental flaw in society is fatherlessness. It is time to delve into the roots of this problem in ourselves and in our communities. It is time to recognize the impact of father wounds in our own lives. Some of those wounds have created hell on earth, not heaven. It is time to seriously take up the responsibility of fatherhood so that the sins of our fathers will not continue to destroy God’s marvelous intention for our lives. It is the time to recognize how a world suffers when Father God is not taken seriously and when His ways are not transferred by His image bearers.

The World Needs A Father will be your guide to understand your role as a father so that the ripples can start flowing through your home, your community and eventually the world. You will learn how a father:

• Establishes moral authority
• Confers identity
• Provides security
• Affirms potential

The Ready to Go! Happy & Healthy Habits Reward Chart Kit contains everything parents need to help children create healthy habits through a strategic use of reward charts, including looking after and improving themselves, eating, sleeping and other health maintenance. Learn how to instil and reinforce these skills through targeted goals and rewards and using expert strategies and advice from renowned child-psychologist Dr Janet Hall. This dynamic reward-chart system has been developed in consultation with professionals and parents and features a comprehensive parenting guide.

Through motivation, encouragement and positive reinforcement, help build essential life skills, teach kids to improve themselves and instil healthy self-care habits that will last a lifetime with Ready to Go! Happy & Healthy Habits.

This book explores representations of fathers in select South African novels published from the birth of apartheid to the post-transitional moment.

Father figures in the texts reflect political and social climates in South Africa – at different times representing the oppressive apartheid government, righteous and authoritative liberation leaders and the unfulfilled promise of a democratic South Africa. Grant Andrews examines how father characters are linked to storytelling; they narrate the lives of their children and their patriarchal power is constituted through narratives. He features authors such as Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, K. Sello Duiker, Mark Behr, Zoë Wicomb, Lisa Fugard and Zukiswa Wanner.

Stories of Fathers, Stories of the Nation also investigates how fatherhoods are being reimagined in light of shifting discourses of gender and identity. More recent novels have deconstructed the father figure and his paternal narrative power, representing conflicts around racial identity, sexuality, legacy and how the sins of the father are visited on his children.

It is so statistically unlikely as to be almost unbelievable. Somehow, the Gronkowski family has produced three sons who play in the NFL (Rob, Chris, and Dan), one who was drafted into Major League Baseball (Gordie, Jr.), and another who is the starting fullback for Kansas State (Goose). Their father, Gordy, even played college football for Syracuse.

How did it happen? From an early age, Gordy realized the potential his sons had and worked with them to make the most of it. Beyond their monstrous size, physicality, and raw talent, he instilled in them a commitment to fitness, health, drive, and determination that would give his boys a leg up in ways other families simply couldn't match. And the boys' motivation certainly wasn't something solely triggered by a driven father. They were like a pack of adolescent wolves readying themselves for the recruiting hunt. Still, all were honor roll students; the three oldest earned college degrees. Each was motivated and inspired by his brothers. Competition and bragging rights were -- and continue to be -- a big part of what makes the Gronkowskis tick. "Growing Up Gronk "reveals the secrets to the Gronkowski's astonishing collective success while opening the door to a lively, entertaining, one-of-a-kind household.

A real-world guide to Attachment Parenting from the "Big Bang Theory" actress, neuroscientist, and mother Mayim Bialik--a book hailed by Dr. William Sears as "delightful" and by Ricki Lake as "a fantastic guide to birth and parenting that is packed with invaluable wisdom."
Mayim Bialik was the child star of the popular 1990s TV sitcom "Blossom, " but she definitely didn't follow the typical child-star trajectory. Instead, Mayim got her PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, married her college sweetheart, and had two kids. Mayim then did what many new moms do--she read a lot of books, talked with other parents, and she soon started questioning a lot of the conventional wisdom she heard about the "right" way to raise a child. That's when she turned to Attachment Parenting, a philosophy and lifestyle popularized by well-known physicians like Dr. William Sears and Dr. Jay Gordon.
To Mayim, Attachment Parenting's natural, child-led approach not only felt right emotionally, it made sense intellectually and instinctually. She found that when she followed her intuition and relaxed into her role as a mother instead of following some rigid parenting script, both she and her children thrived. Taking into account her experience as a mother (and her scientific background), Mayim presents the major tenets of Attachment Parenting, including:
Baby wearing: How to "wear" your baby in a sling or a wrap to foster a closer bond with your child--it's possible even for mamas with bad backs (and with big babies)
Breastfeeding: Learn how to listen to your baby's cues rather than sticking to a rigid schedule--and why people on airplanes love a nursing mother
Gentle discipline: How to get your child to behave without yelling, threats, or time-outs--it really is possible.
Co-sleeping: How to avoid "sleep training" and get a great night's sleep for the whole family.
Without the pretense and luxuries typical of so many Hollywood actors and parents, Mayim describes the beauty, simplicity, and purposefulness of Attachment Parenting, and how it's become the guiding principle for her family. Much more than a simple how-to parenting guide, "Beyond the Sling" shows us that the core principles underlying Attachment Parenting are universal and can be appreciated no matter how you decide to raise your child.

The twentieth anniversary edition of the classic parenting book, now updated to reflect Steven Vannoy's two decades of experience helping both families and businesses better care for their children and employees.
For more than twenty years, "The 10 Greatest Gifts I Give My Children" has been helping parents to put the joy back into parenting. Steven Vannoy's unique parenting style is designed to create a harmonious family atmosphere with self-esteem, compassion, balance, humor, communication, integrity, responsibility, conscious choice, and full expression of emotions.
And parents are not the only ones who have benefitted from Vannoy's wisdom: in the years since the book was first published, Vannoy has used the principles in this book to help businesses worldwide create healthier and more fulfilling workplaces. With updated principles and a new foreword by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition will help both new and old readers of "The 10 Greatest Gifts I Give My Children" build better relationships with their children and colleagues both in the office and at home.

Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xinran has written one of the most powerful accounts of the lives of Chinese women. She has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers--students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants--who, whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions, or hideous economic necessity, have given up their daughters. Xinran beautifully portrays the "extra-birth guerrillas" who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold on to more than one baby; naive young girl students who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the "pebble mother" on the banks of the Yangtze River still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can't produce a male heir; and Little Snow, the orphaned baby fostered by Xinran but confiscated by the state.
For parents of adopted Chinese children and for the children themselves, this is an indispensable, powerful, and intensely moving book. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is powered by love and by heartbreak and will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page.

"Why do grown-ups have to take over everything?" This innocent question from acclaimed journalist and international bestselling author Carl Honore's son sparked a two-year investigation into how our culture of speed, efficiency, and success at all costs is damaging both parents and children. When the impulse to give children the best of everything runs rampant, parents, schools, communities, and corporations unwittingly combine forces to create over-scheduled, over-stimulated, and overindulged kids. The mere mention of potty-training, ballet classes, preschool, ADD, or overeating is enough to spark a heated debate about the right way to raise our children. The problem is that despite the best intentions of all involved, the pressure to manage every detail of our children's lives from in utero through college is overwhelming.

Delivering much more than a wake-up call, international bestselling author Carl Honore interviews experts in Europe, North America, and the Far East, talks to families around the world and sifts through the latest scientific research. Not only do we see the real dangers of micromanaging children, but Honore also shows us an emerging new movement inspiring many to slow down and find the natural balance between too little and too much. Blending the finest reportage, intellectual inquiry, and extraordinary true stories, Under Pressure is the first book to challenge the status quo by mapping out an alternative to the culture of hyperparenting that is presently pushing children and their parents to the brink.