First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The teenage years. . . parents fear this stage, dreading it even while watching their adorable toddlers explore the world. When it arrives, they try to control their teenager, in turn causing their teenager to push back more intensely. It's a natural instinct on both sides: teenagers are changing in every way while trying to assert their independence, and parents are faced with the challenge of coming up with rules, expectations, and standards for behavior without a genuine understanding of what is happening. But the result of this pattern is a parent-child relationship defined by conflict and reactivity--a breeding ground for stress, anger, and anxiety, all of which reinforcing those same cultural stereotypes and worst fears. But it doesn't have to be this way. In this book, family therapist Darby Fox challenges parents to redefine the goals of adolescence by reorienting their focus from what they want their child to be to on who they want their child to be. Darby not only equips parents with the insight to understand the changes taking place in their child's brain and body and support their adolescent's bid for independence, but also offers an approach that allows parents to engage their adolescent in a relationship instead of struggling in an endless battle for control. The book is organized around a series of persistent myths about adolescence, each of which the author tears down with a combination of cutting edge neuroscience research, developmental psychology, and her own mix of clinical observations and experience raising four children. Darby offers a new model for the parent-child relationship, encouraging parents to let go of the attempt to control their teenager and focus instead on creating mutual respect, providing structure and nurture, and encouraging independence in their developing teenager. She walks through the keys to combining structure and nurture and teaches parents how to connect with their teen while holding them accountable for their behavior. If parents approach teen years with the same thoughtful preparation, sense of awe and wonder, and responsibility that they do the early childhood years, it can be an enjoyable and rewarding developmental stage that deepens, rather than damages, parent-child relationships.

Teaching is a lifelong challenge, but the first few years in the classroom are typically a teacher's hardest. This expanded collection of writings and reflections offers practical guidance on how to navigate the school system, form rewarding relationships with colleagues, and connect in meaningful ways with students and families from all cultures and backgrounds.

A charming, meticulously researched, and illuminating look at how technology infiltrates every aspect of raising children today, filled with helpful advice parents can use to best navigate the digital landscape, and ultimately learn to trust their own judgment. There’s an app or device for nearly every aspect of parenting today: monitoring your baby; entertaining or educating your toddler; connecting with other new parents for tips, tricks, and community—virtually every aspect of daily life. But it isn’t a parenting paradise; the truth is much more complicated. The mother of two young daughters, journalist Sophie Brickman wondered what living in a tech-saturated world was doing to her and her children. She turned to experts, academics, doctors, and innovators for advice and insight. Baby, Unplugged brings together Brickman’s in-depth research with her own candid (sometimes hilarious) personal experience to help parents sort through the wide and often confusing tech offerings available today and to sort out what’s helpful and what’s not. Filled with relatable and entertaining stories as well as practical takeaways, Baby, Unplugged is destined to become a touchstone for parents today, giving them the permission to forge their own path through the morass of technological options, to restore their faith in themselves, and to help them raise good, social, and engaged people in the modern world.

Traditional work on child development is often based on notions of an individual and decontextualized child. This volume involves a contribution to the rethinking of development: it presents a number of situated studies where children’s perspectives are documented through their interaction with others in situated practices, in family life and school and across social contexts. This volume offers a toolkit for analyzing children’s perspectives and participation over time. In prior work, the interview has often been seen as the cardinal method – or the only method – for studying children’s perspectives. This anthology includes vignettes and case studies, with descriptions of children’s actions in situated activity settings as well as illustrative transcripts from video-recorded social interaction. It opens up toward a broader view of ‘development’ in that it documents how children’s and youths’ perspectives and agency can be studied through their ways of interacting (or not interacting) in everyday life. One aspect of this is their verbal and nonverbal participation in family life and the social landscape of schools. Another feature is that it involves several chapters that problematize ‘impaired practices’ and dilemmas in the teaching of children with dysfunctions. The book as a whole is rich in empirical ethnographic examples that highlight life trajectories in and across social contexts. Moreover, it features interview data and narratives that include children’s and youths’ own reflections on their lives and experiences of the social demands of family and school. This includes their own thoughts on being or becoming members of local communities.

Parent-adolescent discord is often handled from a unitary perspective, whether the focus is on enhancing parenting skills, resolving conflicts in family relationships, or working to improve the behavior of the individual child. This important work shows the clinician how to incorporate all of these crucial elements into a single, research-based treatment program. Presented is the authors' influential integration of cognitive-behavioral constructs and family systems theory, grounded in consideration of adolescent developmental concerns. The book describes effective ways to conceptualize and assess the problems of embattled parents and teens; use assessment data in treatment planning; overcome resistance and other therapeutic hurdles; and implement carefully sequenced skills training, cognitive restructuring, and functional/structural interventions. The theoretical and empirical bases of the treatment approach are also discussed in depth.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.