Families with boys often find the world reacts to them in mock horror. Even though parents love their sons, privately they admit that boys can be a handful to raise--they are boisterous, competitive, reckless, distractable. The challenge of wills between parent and son starts early, and the quest to civilize young bulls may seem hopeless some days. Yet believers know that God has given them children as a gift of heaven, specially chosen for their particular families and marked as a blessing. If that's so, why does it seem so hard? How can we prepare these boys to serve God when it's all we can do to make it through another day? Isn't there a better way? Raising Real Men: Surviving, Teaching and Appreciating Boys shows the answer is emphatically yes. Written by the parents of six boys, Raising Real Men provides hope and encouragement to families with sons. Starting from the premise that God made boys to become men, Hal and Melanie Young offer Biblical principles and tested, practical ideas for training the manly virtues that can drive parents and teachers up the wall. This is a practical guide to equipping the hearts and minds of boys without breaking or losing your own. "...earthy, realistic, humorous, and scriptural ..." -- Douglas Wilson, author, Future Men "This is just what the doctor ordered for parents who want to raise capable Christian men of character." -- John Rosemond, author, Parenting By The Book

As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.

Raise Your Teens on a Rock-Solid Foundation As children mature, it’s important for parents to prepare for the unique changes and challenges of adolescence. With so many cultural pressures and influences vying for teens’ attention, parents need a secure foundation for creating an environment where faith can flourish. Parenting with Hope invites you to anchor your hopes and expectations in Christ—the true source of wisdom, strength, contentment, and fruitful parenting. Integrating sound biblical teaching, insights from developmental experts, and her own experiences as a teacher and mother, Melissa Kruger will wisely guide you through today’s most common concerns. Emphasizing principles over prescriptions, Melissa will help you to understand how you can build up and bless your teens in God-honoring ways. When you recognize God as the ultimate parent, you'll begin to truly understand that he is presently at work in the hearts of both parents and teens. This encouraging and practical guide will equip you with the wisdom to cultivate a Christ-centered household, passing on a legacy of faithfulness to your teenage children.

Kids are soft these days. They lack resilience. They need to be more focused. Kids don't take any responsibility for themselves and their choices. They need to be more proactive and take charge of their lives. They all have ADHD. This endless list of complaints about all the things children and teens today are lacking, and how hard it makes parenting and teaching them makes me wonder when it all became the fault of the children. When did the adults relinquish all responsibility for how children are growing up these days? If there is a lack in their development, this falls squarely on the shoulders of the adults in their lives. This begs the question, what has gone wrong? What has gone wrong in our parenting and in our schools that has resulted in a rise in child and teen mental health issues? What are we failing to do for them to prepare them better for life? If there is such an immense and ever-growing mental health crisis amongst young people today, it says that something is wrong and not with the children themselves, but with how we are raising and educating them. What if we take a step back and take a long hard look at our education systems and parenting styles? And what if we try and understand children and emerging adults today and accept the fact that they are different, their own generation, with their own unique thoughts and values that don't fit into the mould left by previous generations? We can't truly establish social emotional education plans, curriculums and support programmes if we do not understand the children we are working with. While the mental health crisis grows amongst our teens and young adults, it is time to accept that we have spent way too long blaming everything and everyone else for this pressing issue. We are so busy putting out fires and sticking plasters on the emotional and developmental damage that our staid, narrow-minded approaches have caused. The only way to really fix the problem and to create a safe, happy, meaningful foundation for our teens and young adults is to approach them from a place of understanding, only then can we guide them to the point where they can flourish. How can we guide them towards their future if we are not even looking at the same map? While there are some tried and trusted approaches out there, that have worked for many years, I am not saying we need to throw them all out and return to the drawing board, I am saying let's look at them all through a new lens, take a new perspective and see what we can change to better suit teens and young adults today. We are trying to stick square pegs into round holes and expecting the pegs to change shape. Let's change the shape of the holes instead. We are failing to prepare them for their future lives because we don't understand them. When I sit and listen to parents and teachers lamenting all the many social emotional and developmental skills children today lack I honestly wonder how they can think children develop the skills they need and how they eventually become young adults if it is not for the role we play in this development. Meaningful change can only come from deep reflection and understanding. We need to make some serious changes to manage the ever-growing mental health crisis affecting our children and young adults today. It behooves us to support and guide this generation, as they are after all, our futures. And in order to do this, we need to approach them from a place of understanding- Who are Gen-Z and what makes them tick?

We live in a self-centered world, despite the call from employers and thought leaders for more cooperation and compassion. Empathy, or the ability to understand other people's thoughts and emotions from their point of view, is a vital component of cooperation and necessary in our increasingly diverse world. The Caring Child: Raising Empathetic and Emotionally Intelligent Children pulls together the latest research from positive psychology to provide parents specific tools to help their children develop healthy empathy and emotional intelligence. Presented in an easy-to-read, conversational style, the book uses a combination of evidence-based strategies, real-world examples, and role-playing scenarios to provide parents with the tools needed to develop these important skills. With specific strategies to address diverse populations and LGBTQ youth, The Caring Child is the must-read resource for anyone dedicated to cultivating a more compassionate world.

From the cradle to college, tell your daughters the truth about life before they believe the culture’s lies. For mothers with girls newborn to eighteen, Five Conversations You Must Have with Your Daughter is simply a must-have book. Youth culture commentator Vicki Courtney helps moms pinpoint and prepare the discussions that should be ongoing in their daughters' formative years. To fully address the dynamic social and spiritual issues and influencers at hand, several chapters are written for each of the conversations, which are: 1. Don’t let the culture define you 2. Guard your heart 3. Have a little sex respect 4. Childhood is only for a season 5. You are who you’ve been becoming The book also includes questions at the end of each conversation to help facilitate individual or group study.

From the cradle to college, tell your sons the truth about life before they believe the culture’s lies. For mothers with boys newborn to eighteen, 5 Conversations You MustHave with Your Son is simply a must-have book. Award-winning youth culture commentator Vicki Courtney helps moms and dads pinpoint and prepare the discussions that should be ongoing in a boy’s formative years. Fully addressing the dynamic social and spiritual issues and other influencers at hand, several chapters are written for each of the conversations, which are: 1. Don’t let the culture define you 2. Guard your heart 3. Have a little sex respect 4. Childhood is only for a season 5. You are who you’ve been becoming The book also includes questions at the end of each conversation to help facilitate individual or group study.