Why is my son so clumsy? Why is my daughter's handwriting so messy? My children only want to play video games: will lack of movement really hurt them? Movement is essential in helping children develop not only motor skills but also intellectual, emotional and social skills. Children learn through 'doing' and play. But a child's journey to learn how to control their body can cause frustration in parents. How often do parents say, "Can you not just sit still?" or treat a grazed knee when children fall over their own feet? By understanding how children develop sensory motor skills -- that is, get information through their senses and respond with their physical body -- parents can start to address and find reassurance about the issues that concern them. In this practical and insightful book, Evelien van Dort's uses her thirty years' experience as a children's physiotherapist, and draws on Rudolf Steiner's theories of child development, to outline how children develop skills such as spacial awareness, balance, coordination and telling right from left. This book will inform and reassure any parent or educator about the impact of a child's movement on their wider learning.

Overnutrition? Undernutrition? Cutting through current anxiety and hype, Small Bites answers key questions about child nutrition and eating by exploring their biological and sociocultural determinants. Are children naturally picky eaters? How can school meals help to address food insecurity and malnutrition? How has the industrial food system commodified children's food and shaped children's bodies? Tina Moffat investigates the feeding of children in school and at home around the world, revealing the influence of varied cultural approaches to childhood and food. This important work sets a course for food policy, schools, communities, and caregivers to improve children's food and nutrition.

This is a user-friendly book that speaks to the realities, challenges, and needs of daily life with rambunctious, enthusiastic, unpredictable toddlers in group settings, thus increasing the quality of toddler care. This book highlights informative and real-life examples, with immediate takeaway action steps that detail solutions and resources for practice.

There's hope for childhood. Despite a perfect storm of hostile forces that are robbing children of a healthy childhood, courageous parents and teachers who know what's best for children are turning the tide. Johann Christoph Arnold, whose books on education, parenting, and relationships have helped more than a million readers through life's challenges, draws on the stories and voices of parents and educators on the ground, and a wealth of personal experience. He surveys the drastic changes in the lives of children, but also the groundswell of grassroots advocacy and action that he believes will lead to the triumph of common sense and time-tested wisdom. Arnold takes on technology, standardized testing, overstimulation, academic pressure, marketing to children, over-diagnosis and much more, calling on everyone who loves children to combat these threats to childhood and find creative ways to help children flourish. Every parent, teacher, and childcare provider has the power to make a difference, by giving children time to play, access to nature, and personal attention, and most of all, by defending their right to remain children.

Help kids develop a positive relationship with food, so they can become healthy and adventurous eaters for life! Is your child a picky eater? Do they insist on having the same foods served over and over again? Be it chicken nuggets, pizza, pancakes, or French fries--if your child is only eating a few foods regularly, their diet may be seriously lacking in the nutrition and vitamins they need to grow and be healthy. And you may feel stressed out and frustrated at mealtime. For many kids, picky eating is a sensory issue--whether it's the smell, taste, texture, or appearance of food. So, how can you help your child overcome these sensory sensitivities and ensure that they get the nourishment they need? Written by a pediatric occupational therapist with a specialty certification in feeding, eating, and swallowing, Raising Adventurous Eaters offers eight evidence-based sensory strategies to help kids foster a healthy relationship with food. You'll learn all about how picky eating can be caused by sensory processing differences, and find step-by-step strategies for dealing with each sense. By learning to lean into their senses, children will better understand what's going on in their bodies. This fosters an intuitive eating approach, teaching kids to listen to their body's hunger and fullness cues and respect and respond to those cues appropriately. Whether or not your child has a diagnosis of sensory processing disorder (SPD), or simply has sensory sensitivities when it comes to food, this book will help you set your child up for successful mealtimes, turning the most stressful time of the day into a time that your family can spend relaxing and bonding together around the table.

This text helps those who went through the adoption process, or experienced early childhood trauma, re-examine their life and realise who they are. It is a book about becoming aware of the reasons for certain attitudes and behaviours.

Your toddler throws a tantrum in the middle of a store. Your preschooler refuses to get dressed. Your fifth-grader sulks on the bench instead of playing on the field. Do children conspire to make their parents' lives endlessly challenging? No--it's just their developing brain calling the shots
In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling "Mindsight," and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson demystify the meltdowns and aggravation, explaining the new science of how a child's brain is wired and how it matures. The "upstairs brain," which makes decisions and balances emotions, is under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain. No wonder kids can seem--and feel--so out of control. By applying these discoveries to everyday parenting, you can turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child's brain and foster vital growth. Raise calmer, happier children using twelve key strategies, including
- Name It to Tame It: Corral raging right-brain behavior through left-brain storytelling, appealing to the left brain's affinity for words and reasoning to calm emotional storms and bodily tension.
- Engage, Don't Enrage: Keep your child thinking and listening, instead of purely reacting.
- Move It or Lose It: Use physical activities to shift your child's emotional state.
- Let the Clouds of Emotion Roll By: Guide your children when they are stuck on a negative emotion, and help them understand that feelings come and go.
- SIFT: Help children pay attention to the Sensations, Images, Feelings, and Thoughts within them so that they can make better decisions and be more flexible.
- Connect Through Conflict: Use discord to encourage empathy and greater social success.
Complete with clear explanations, age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles, and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, "The Whole-Brain Child" shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.

Making conscientious choices about technology in our families is more than just using internet filters and determining screen time limits for our children. It's about developing wisdom, character, and courage in the way we use digital media rather than accepting technology's promises of ease, instant gratification, and the world's knowledge at our fingertips. And it's definitely not just about the kids. Drawing on in-depth original research from the Barna Group, Andy Crouch shows readers that the choices we make about technology have consequences we may never have considered. He takes readers beyond the typical questions of what, where, and when and instead challenges them to answer provocative questions like, Who do we want to be as a family? and How does our use of a particular technology move us closer or farther away from that goal? Anyone who has felt their family relationships suffer or their time slip away amid technology's distractions will find in this book a path forward to reclaiming their real life in a world of devices.

A groundbreaking approach to parenting by nationally-respected educator Alfie Kohn that gives parents "powerful alternatives to help children become their most caring, responsible selves" (Adele Faber, New York Times bestselling author) by switching the dynamic from doing things to children to working with them in order to understand their needs and how to meet them. Most parenting guides begin with the question "How can we get kids to do what they're told?" and then proceed to offer various techniques for controlling them. In this truly groundbreaking book, nationally respected educator Alfie Kohn begins instead by asking, "What do kids need-and how can we meet those needs?" What follows from that question are ideas for working with children rather than doing things to them. One basic need all children have, Kohn argues, is to be loved unconditionally, to know that they will be accepted even if they screw up or fall short. Yet conventional approaches to parenting such as punishments (including "time-outs"), rewards (including positive reinforcement), and other forms of control teach children that they are loved only when they please us or impress us. Kohn cites a body of powerful, and largely unknown, research detailing the damage caused by leading children to believe they must earn our approval. That's precisely the message children derive from common discipline techniques, even though it's not the message most parents intend to send. More than just another book about discipline, though, Unconditional Parenting addresses the ways parents think about, feel about, and act with their children. It invites them to question their most basic assumptions about raising kids while offering a wealth of practical strategies for shifting from "doing to" to "working with" parenting-including how to replace praise with the unconditional support that children need to grow into healthy, caring, responsible people. This is an eye-opening, paradigm-shattering book that will reconnect readers to their own best instincts and inspire them to become better parents.

"One day Jack asked me, 'What color do you see for Monday?' 'What?' I said distractedly. 'Do you see days as colors?" Raising five children would be challenge enough for most parents, but when one of them has been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, life becomes a bit more chaotic, a lot more emotional, and full of fascinating glimpses into a unique child's different way of thinking. In this moving memoir, Carrie Cariello invites us to take a peek into exactly what it takes to get through each day juggling the needs of her whole family. Through hilarious mishaps, honest insights, and heartfelt letters addressed to her children, she shows us the beauty and wonder of raising a child who views the world through a different lens, and how ultimately autism changed her family for the better.

Praise for the first edition: 'An approachable and practical edition that will be welcomed by parents and carers alike. I know how hard it can be to find "How to" resources for parents. Well here is a gem.' - Children, Young People and Families Parents of young children newly diagnosed as on the autism spectrum are often at a loss for ideas about how best to help their child. Playing, Laughing and Learning with Children on the Autism Spectrum is not just a collection of play ideas; it shows how to break down activities into manageable stages, and looks at ways to gain a child's attention and motivation and to build on small achievements. Each chapter covers a collection of ideas around a theme, including music, art, physical activities, playing outdoors, puzzles, turn-taking and using existing toys to create play sequences. There are also chapters on introducing reading and making the most of television. This updated second edition contains an extensive chapter on how to use the computer, the internet and the digital camera to find and make resources and activities, and suggests many suitable websites to help parents through the internet maze. The ideas are useful both for toddlers and primary age children who are still struggling with play.

All parents want their child to get the most out of school and to acquire the knowledge and skills that will stand them in good stead for later life. But with an ever-expanding curriculum, increasing class sizes, and the lure of TV and computer games, parents are sometimes at a loss as to how to help their children. In Calmer, Easier, Happier Homework, parenting expert Noel Janis-Norton, shows how parents can help their children develop the skills and resources they need to succeed. A former classroom teacher, Noel offers practical strategies on everything from establishing good homework habits to encouraging even the most reluctant reader to love books. Calmer, Easier, Happier Homework is a practical programme that will transform your child's education. - For parents of children ages 4-14 -

From growing their children, parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. "Growing up", then, is as much a developmental process of parenthood as it is of childhood. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, and we grow older, what used to be a one-way flow of instruction and support, from parent to child, becomes instead an exchange. We begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them. With Growing Each Other Up, Macarthur Prize winning sociologist and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful account of that experience. Building her book on a series of in-depth interviews with parents around the country, she offers a counterpoint to the usual parental development literature that mostly concerns the adjustment of parents to their babies' rhythms and the ways parents weather the storms of their teenage progeny. The focus here is on the lessons emerging adult children, ages 15 to 35, teach their parents. How are our perspectives as parents shaped by our children? What lessons do we take from them and incorporate into our worldviews? Just how much do we learn often despite our own emotionally fraught resistance from what they have seen of life that we, perhaps, never experienced? From these parent portraits emerges the shape of an education composed by young adult children an education built on witness, growing, intimacy, and acceptance. Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time. Parents and children of all ages will recognize themselves in these evocative and moving accounts and look at their own growing up in a revelatory new light.

THE UNDERDOGS tells the story of Karen Shirk: felled at age 24 by a neuromuscular disease and facing life as an immobile, deeply isolated and depressed, ventilator-dependent patient, she was rejected by every service dog agency in the country as "too disabled." Her nurse encouraged her to raise her own service dog, and Ben, a German shepherd, dragged her back into life. "How many people are stranded like I was," she wondered, "who could lead productive lives with a service dog?" A thousand dogs later, Karen Shirk's service dog academy, 4 Paws for Ability, is restoring broken children and their families to life. Melissa Fay Greene tells the stories of isolated children, struggling parents, and the marvelous dogs who gallop into their lives. Into these modern wonder tales, she weaves the latest scientific discoveries about the inner lives of dogs. It turns out that dogs really are doing the astounding things they appear to do, and they're doing them for people they love. The frontiers of the human/dog bond are explored here with insight, compassion, humor, and joy. A cast of remarkable characters-scientists and felons, dog trainers and parents, children with disabilities and the great dogs themselves-together address questions about our attachment to dogs, what constitutes a productive life, and what can be accomplished with unconditional love.

The timeless New York Times bestselling guide to parenting that shows the power of inspiring values through example. A unique handbook to raising children with a compassionate, steady hand--and to giving them the support and confidence they need to thrive. Expanding on her universally loved poem "Children Learn What They Live," Dorothy Law Nolte, with psychotherapist Rachel Harris, reveals how parenting by example--by showing, not just telling--instills positive, true values in children that they will carry with them throughout their lives. Addressing issues of security, self-worth, tolerance, honesty, fear, respect, fairness, patience, and more, this book of rare common sense will help a new generation of parents find their own parenting wisdom--and draw out their child's immense inner resources. If children live with criticism they learn to condemn. If children live with sharing, they learn generosity. If children live with acceptance, they learn to love. And more wisdom.

Access to technology has created a generation of children who are more plugged in than ever before - often with negative consequences. Unrestricted outdoor play reduces stress, improves health, and enhances creativity, learning, and attention span. In Nature Play at Home, Nancy Striniste gives caregivers the tools they need to make outdoor adventures possible in their homes, schools, and neighbourhoods. With hundreds of inspiring ideas and 12 illustrated, step-by-step projects, this hardworking book details how to create playspaces that use natural materials - like logs, boulders, sand, water, and plants of all kinds. Projects include hillside slides, seating circles, sand pits, and more. Accessible, research-based, and timely, Nature Play at Home is a must-have for modern parents and caregivers.

Based on whole body approaches to learning perfected by Sally Goddard Blythe and with songs by Michael Lazarev, this book gives us an essential overview of child growth from age three to seven years. It explains why movement and music are essential for healthy brain development and learning, and includes tried and tested exercises for helping children become school ready. Sally describes the neonatal reflexes and how children learn with their bodies, and explains the dangers of speeding up childhood. Two CDs of Michael Lazarev's 10 songs and exercises provide creative and enjoyable music and movement activities to help develop coordination and language skills, while the action-stories and nursery rhymes will encourage children to move, listen, and learn. This invaluable resource is suitable for parents, teachers, early-years educators, health visitors, paediatricians, special needs teachers and educational psychologists.

Do you ever find yourself asking . . .
- How can you get your children to do their homework without meltdowns, threats or bribes?
- How can you have a drama-free morning where the kids actually get out the door in time for school?
- How can you better manage your kids' screen time without making them want to hide what they're doing from you?
Family therapist Susan Stiffelman is here to help. While most parenting programs are designed to coerce kids to change, "Parenting Without Power Struggles" does something innovative, showing you how to come alongside your children to awaken their natural instincts to cooperate, rather than at them with threats or bribes, which inevitably fuels their resistance. By staying calm and being the confident "Captain of the ship" your child needs, you will learn how to parent from a place of strong, durable connection, and you'll be better able to help your kids navigate the challenging moments of growing up.
Drawing upon her successful practice and packed with real-life stories, "Parenting Without Power Struggles" is an extraordinary guidebook for transforming the day-to-day lives of busy parents--and the children they love.

"Your child has autism" - four small words with the power to leave parents feeling helpless, overwhelmed, and confused. This concise, no-nonsense book will enable parents to regain control of the situation and take the first practical steps towards a calm and happy life with their newly-diagnosed child. Dr. Larson Kidd's approach draws from the vast amount of information available on parenting a child with autism and distils it into ten manageable steps. It covers the key aspects of life with a child on the autism spectrum, including the basics such as sleeping, eating, and toileting, through adapting the home, creating routines, and exploring therapy. Ready-to-implement strategies are outlined simply and clearly, and are firmly grounded in the author's extensive experience of supporting children with autism. This practical book will be essential and empowering reading for every parent whose child has recently been diagnosed with autism or for parents still struggling with where to begin to help their child.