The fourteen essential conversations to have with your tween and early teenager to prepare them for the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead, including scripts and advice to keep the communication going and stay connected during this critical developmental window. “This book is a gift to parents and teenagers alike.”—Lisa Damour, PhD, author of Untangled and Under Pressure Trying to convince a middle schooler to listen to you can be exasperating. Indeed, it can feel like the best option is not to talk! But keeping kids safe—and prepared for all the times when you can't be the angel on their shoulder—is about having the right conversations at the right time. From a brain growth and emotional readiness perspective, there is no better time for this than their tween years, right up to when they enter high school. Distilling Michelle Icard's decades of experience working with families, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen focuses on big, thorny topics such as friendship, sexuality, impulsivity, and technology, as well as unexpected conversations about creativity, hygiene, money, privilege, and contributing to the family. Icard outlines a simple, memorable, and family-tested formula for the best approach to these essential talks, the BRIEF Model: Begin peacefully, Relate to your child, Interview to collect information, Echo what you're hearing, and give Feedback. With wit and compassion, she also helps you get over the most common hurdles in talking to tweens, including: • What phrases invite connection and which irritate kids or scare them off • The best places, times, and situations in which to initiate talks • How to keep kids interested, open, and engaged in conversation • How to exit these chats in a way that keeps kids wanting more Like a Rosetta Stone for your tween's confounding language, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen is an essential communication guide to helping your child through the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead and, ultimately, toward teenage success.

Middle School Makeover is a guide for parents and educators to help the tweens in their lives navigate the socially fraught hallways, gyms, and cafeterias of middle school. The book helps parents, teachers, and other adults in middle school settings to understand the social dilemmas and other issues that kids today face. Author Michelle Icard covers a large range of topics, beginning with helping us understand what is happening in the brains of tweens and how these neurological development affects decision-making and questions around identity. She also addresses social media, dating, and peer exclusion. Using both recent research and her personal, extensive experience working with middle-school-aged kids and their parents, Icard offers readers concrete and practical advice for guiding children through this chaotic developmental stage while also building their confidence.

Now in a three-part edition that incorporates the latest research on pediatric brain development, Watch Me Grow: I'm One-Two-Three helps parents in their decision-making by explaining how children experience the world during the wondrous toddler years. In addition to offering the most current research on age-appropriate behavior and sharing parenting stories, this book also gives sound advice from an expert on child development. Using wisdom and humor, Dr. O'Brien gives parents and childcare providers a deeper understanding of the hearts and minds of their growing one-, two-, and three-year-old children.

Raise your hand if your parents had "the talk" with you. No, not that talk. We mean the money talk. Money affects you and your kids every day. Now there's a way to talk about money in a way that actually brings your family closer. With two kids of our own, we suspect our parenting goals are likely the same as yours—no spoiled brats, no crippling debt, and kids who know a dollar actually takes work. That's why we wrote this book. The 5 Money Conversations to Have with Your Kids at Every Age and Stage offers practical advice for dealing with three age groups (5–12, 13–17, and 18 and beyond). It is the parenting "how to" book you don't want to live without. Conquer the 5 toughest money conversations to have with your kids Discover your kids' Money Personalities by taking the age-based Money Personalities Assessment (access code included inside) Learn their Money Languages so you can be heard We give you relationship secrets, share our experiences, and make it fun. Whether your kids are 5 or 25, this book will change the course of your family forever!

The author shares his haunting story of growing up in a family of 14 children, of which he was a boy who couldn't find any room to breathe until he left his 13 siblings behind and withdrew to the world inside his head--only to emerge 40 years later, still alone.

This inclusive guide to how every family begins is an honest, cheerful tool for conversations between parents and their young ones. To make a baby you need one egg, one sperm, and one womb. But every family starts in its own special way. This book answers the "Where did I come from?" question no matter who the reader is and how their life began. From all different kinds of conception through pregnancy to the birth itself, this candid and cozy guide is just right for the first conversations that parents will have with their children about how babies are made.