“You never listen to anything I say!” Yesterday, your child was a sweet, well-adjusted eight-year-old. Today, a moody, disrespectful twelve-year-old. What happened? And more important, how do you handle it? How you respond to these whirlwind changes will not only affect your child's behavior now but will determine how he or she turns out later. Julie A. Ross, executive director of Parenting Horizons, shows you exactly what's going on with your child and provides all the tools you need to correctly handle even the prickliest tween porcupine. Find out how other parents survived nightmarish tween behavior--and still raised great kids Break the “nagging cycle,” give your kids responsibilities, and get results Talk about sex, drugs, and alcohol so your kid will listen Discover the secret that will help your child to disregard peer pressure and make smart choices--for life "This excellent book lets parents peek into the underlying, confusing thoughts and perplexing decisions that young tweens are constantly facing." --Ralph I. López, M.D., Clinical Professor or Pediatrics, Cornell University, and author of The Teen Health Book

Innovative and refreshing strategies for how to love, understand, and communicate with difficult people—at home, at work, and in your community Most of us know someone who, for whatever reason, always seems to cause problems, irritate others, or incite conflict. Often, these people are a part of our daily lives. The truth is that these troublemakers haven’t necessarily asked to be this way. Sometimes we need to learn new approaches to deal with people who are harder to get along with or love. How to Hug a Porcupine explains that making peace with others isn’t as tough or terrible as we think it is—especially when you can use an adorable animal analogy and apply it to real-life problems. Whether you want to calm the quills of parents, children, siblings, or strangers, How to Hug a Porcupine provides useful tips for your encounters with “prickly” people, such as: • Three easy ways to end an argument • How to spot the porcupine in others • How to spot the porcupine in ourselves With a foreword by noted psychotherapist Dr. Debbie Ellis, widow of Dr. Albert Ellis, How to Hug a Porcupine is a truly special book.

Are you concerned or frustrated with the choices your child makes when it comes to their peer groups, study habits, and use of social media? Do you feel your child is pushing you away and your connection is weakening? Are you unsure of the next steps you should take to help your child succeed? A whole new set of parenting concerns arise during tween and teenhood that can be overwhelming for any parent. The Ultimate Guide to Raising Teens and Tweens offers a step-by-step plan for raising your adolescent through this tumultuous time. Douglas Haddad provides specific, proven tools for you to help your child become a problem solver and grow to be smart, successful, and self-disciplined. In The Ultimate Guide to Raising Teens and Tweens, you will: Discover the secrets of effective communication with your child Learn the techniques to stop behavior problems right in their tracks when they happen Know the strategies to best motivate your child and unlock their potential Find out how to set appropriate limits and hold your child accountable for their actions Understand today’s “child-limiting challenges” and the solutions for handling them with your child Every parent wants the best for their child, and these years can be fraught with challenges: bullying, violence, gambling, sex, smoking, alcohol, substance use, eating disorders, depression, suicide, unhealthy eating, lack of physical activity, etc. Making sense of these challenges, this book offers exercises for incorporating the ten child unlimited tools into your parenting style and anecdotes to illustrate strategies and techniques. Supported by current research, the tools found in these pages will serve as a guide for any family with tweens or teens.

In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

In this clear and compassionate guide, an expert counselor offers help for parents dealing with the misbehavior of good kids. Here are step-by-step solutions for handling just about every explosive situation, plus advice on how parents can preserve their sanity.

After decades of civil war and instability, the African country of Angola is experiencing a spectacular economic boom thanks to its most valuable natural resource: oil. Focusing on the everyday realities of people living in the extraction zones, Reed explores the exclusion, degradation, and violence that are the fruits of petrocapitalism in Angola.

"Practical help. Real encouragement. Just what you need to cope with emotional meltdowns, motivate them to get school done, answer their spiritual questions, and most of all, protect your relationship with your eight to fourteen year olds"--Amazon.com.