Resources for Parents

Resources for Parents

Amy’s Recommended Resources for Parents
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amy's parenting specialties
Amy’s Parenting Specialties
ADHD / Neurodivergent Children
ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—from Childhood through Adulthood by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. and John Ratey, M.D. is an excellent and very readable book that will help you learn how to harness the strengths and reduce the challenges of living with ADHD.
8 Keys to Parenting Children with ADHD by Cindy Goldrich is a concise, easy-to-read distillation of her course for parents of a child with ADHD, full of tips and tools and wise, compassionate advice.
ADHD is Awesome: A Guide to (Mostly) Thriving with ADHD by Penn and Kim Holderness is an easy-to-digest book full of stories of what it’s like to live with ADHD and with someone with ADHD. Part 3 shares excellent practical tips and strategies from real life that help your whole family to thrive.
ADDitude website is an incredible place to learn about ADHD and explore symptoms and treatment options, educational resources, parenting children with ADHD, being an adult with ADHD, and how to harness the strengths of ADHD and work with the challenges.
TiLT Parenting website Debbie Reber, founder, works to change the way “differently wired” children — with ADHD, learning disabilities, autism, giftedness, processing challenges, twice-exceptionality, and more — are perceived and experienced so these children and their parents can thrive. Check out her website and podcast episodes.

Thriving in College with ADHD  This article contains suggestions for college students with ADHD, including great resource links at the end. 7 Tips for College Students with ADHD offers excellent, practical tips as well.

Anxiety
For Kids
Superpowered: Transform Anxiety into Courage, Confidence and Resilience by Renee Jain and Dr. Shefali Tsabary is a wonderful tool for kids ages 6-teens to understand and respond to their own anxiety. It’s full of helpful hands-on tips in graphic novel-inspired form with interactive elements. My own daughter asked if she could borrow it to read and thought it was great.

For Parents

The Anxiety Audit: Seven Sneaky Ways Anxiety Takes Hold and How to Escape Them (Anxiety Series) by Lynn Lyons LICSW helps parents identify their own anxiety patterns and learn how to “unhook” from them in effective ways. Through stories and practical strategies, Lyons helps parents help themselves and their children to move out of anxiety patterns and into greater peace and confidence. Lynn Lyons, LICSW has an excellent website with books, articles, podcasts and courses to help your family with anxiety. I have also listened to her talks and appreciate her practical, immediately useful tips.
Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD: A Scientifically Proven Program for Parents by Eli R. Lebowitz, PhD helps parents learn how to handle the constant internal questions and challenges that are part of parenting an anxious child, especially in the context of the family. Parents learn how to avoid common traps and pitfalls with new and supportive responses that grow their child’s ability to come with anxious feelings. You can hear a great interview with Eli Lebowitz on the TiLT Parenting podcast.
Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind by Judson Brewer, MD, PhD explains how to use tiny habits and brain-based techniques to diffuse our anxiety triggers and break free of anxiety loops. His work is based on more than 20 years of research and hands-on work with a wide-range of people.
Communication
The 5 Love Languages of Children: The Secret to Loving Children Effectively by Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell will help you discover and use your child’s primary love language in all sorts of ways that yield powerful results. Children benefit from your use of all five of the love languages. However, when you learn how to love each child in their preferred way, you will see your children grow and flourish even more as your bond of love, trust, and respect grows. Chapman and Campbell share vivid examples to help you remember how to use the 5 love languages long after you finish the book.
The 5 Love Languages of Teenagers: The Secret to Increasing Joy and Trust with your Teen by Gary Chapman offers helpful insights to understand your teen’s primary love language so that you can communicate in ways that build a strong, loving connection throughout the teen years. He shares memorable examples to help you learn how to navigate challenging situations with love, clarity, and effectiveness. You will enjoy being together more and feel mutual respect and trust grow. He also includes great chapters that explore love and anger, responsibility, single and blended families, and independence.

Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen: The Essential Conversations You Need to Have with Your Kids Before They Start High School by Michelle Icard is a wise and helpful guide on how to start the critical conversations we need to have with our teenagers and keep them going over the coming years. She offers useful relatable examples, scripts, and memorable tips that can help you with kids of any age, even adults! Check out my blog on her BRIEF conversation model and key ways to open conversations with teens.

What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home by William Stixrud, PhD and Ned Johnson teaches you how to engage in respectful and effective dialogue with kids, especially over age 10, when conversations often get thorny or drop off. This book is full of relatable stories, helpful dialogues, and insightful ways to give feedback, discuss boundaries, problem solve and more with more confidence and skill. My clients often tell me that this book pairs beautifully with ideas we explore in our coaching together.
Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer is a wonderful book that will improve all of the relationships in your life. He shares simple practices that bring together mindfulness, somatics, and Nonviolent Communication to develop clear, kind, and healthy ways of communicating. I also love listening to Sofer’s online meditations and highly recommend anything he creates.
Also see resources under Family Harmony, Sibling Rivalry and Mindful Parenting.
Communicating with your Partner
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 3rd Ed. by Marshall B. Rosenburg, PhD is an excellent explanation and overview of a way to create connection through compassion and conversation so that everyone’s needs can be met. My clients and I have found this book to be deeply inspiring and helpful to improving relationships between parents and between kids and parents.
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Dr. Sue Johnson helps couples understand the emotional aspects of their relationships and how to be more open, attuned and responsive to each other. She shares how to shift gears in key moments in order to be able to connect and bond with each other instead of falling into old patterns.
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary Chapman offers a proven approach to learn how to experience deeper connection with your partner, children, and anyone you care for in your life. You will be more able to both show and receive love as you gain insight and practical wisdom and skills.

The Enneagram is a powerful way to understand yourself and your relationship with your partner more fully. I recommend taking the RHETI test and then scheduling a call with me to talk through your results. I trained and got certified with Elaine Bailey to use the Enneagram in my coaching. My clients have found this perspective to be very useful and illuminating in personal growth and fostering greater harmony in relationships.

Digital Age / Screen Safety
Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World by Devorah Heitner shares ideas parents can implement that help you better understand and relate to the ways kids are engaging with technology. You will also learn skills to help your child navigate social challenges that are part of this technological world.
Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal offers research-backed, effective methods for getting the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us, including the roles parents play.

Common Sense Media website has excellent resources and guidance for parents to help their kids thrive in the 21st century.

Empathy
UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World by Michele Borba Ed.D. is essential reading if you want to learn creative and powerful ways of teaching empathy and compassion. You can share the stories at your dinner table and use her step by step guide to expand your child’s perspective in fun and interesting ways.

Common Sense Media offers a great list of children’s books to teach empathy.

I also recommend the books in the Communication section for developing empathy.
Family Harmony
Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD. In Hunt, Gather, Parent, Doucleff sets out with her spirited three-year-old daughter to learn and practice parenting strategies from families in three different cultures across the world. She is humble and funny as she learns from the Maya families in Mexico, Inuit families above the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe families in Tanzania. She learns how behavior problems can disappear when parent-child relationships are built on cooperation instead of control, trust instead of fear, and personalized needs instead of standardized development milestones. Doucleff does an excellent job of summarizing these strategies in easy-to-read ways that you can apply immediately.
The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed by Jessica Lahey. Lahey shares through vivid examples how allowing children to experience the disappointment and frustration that occur from life’s inevitable problems helps them to grow up to be successful, happy, resilient, and self-reliant adults. She shares powerful ways to handle everything from homework, report cards, and social dynamics to getting ready in the morning, sports, and other activities. This book powerfully influenced my parenting when my kids were in grade school. It’s great to listen to, as well!

The Family Virtues Guide: Simple Ways to Bring Out the Best in Our Children and Ourselves by Linda Kavelin Popov helps parents inspire moral and spiritual growth in children of all ages. It draws on writings from the world’s religions as well as practical tips and scenarios to help teach people of all ages how to turn words into actions. I used this book for my core curriculum of my Peacemakers classes, which I taught for over 11 years in my neighborhood with a group of interfaith children. It’s super helpful for inspiring conversations with your children about how to understand the meaning of virtues and how to be their best selves.

Confident Parents, Remarkable Kids: 8 Principles for Raising Kids You’ll Love to Live With by Bonnie Harris offer straightforward, helpful guidance in raising children of any age and bringing about greater family peace. This book works beautifully with a book group because of its format and chapter summaries. It’s a reference you will return to year after year because of its sound advice.
Mindful Parenting
The Conscious Parent by Shefali Tsabary, PhD is an excellent book that shows how we as parents learn alongside our children in a mutual way through mindfulness and curiosity. I have used elements of this book to design Mindful Parenting workshops for various organizations.
Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids by Hunter Clarke Fields. This book outlines the key mindfulness skills that help parents step out of fear, anger, and internal “not good enough” feelings of their own to be able to create more loving and cooperative family relationships. Hunter Clarke-Fields also has an excellent podcast and website.
Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn is a foundational book to help parents grow in emotional self-awareness and understand mind-body connection.
Mindfulness for Kids
Growing Up Mindful: Essential Practices to Help Children, Teens, and Families Find Balance, Calm, and Resilience by Christopher Willard, PsyD is full of easy-to-apply practices you can use for yourself and with your kids and teens. I taught some of these techniques in my Mindful Parenting Series and parents found them to be very useful.
The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate by Susan Kaiser Greenland teaches parents how to share the large benefits of mindfulness with children ages 4–18 years old through exercises, song, fables and games. Children learn to pay closer attention to their thoughts, feelings, and emotions which leads to greater kindness and compassion towards themselves and others.
New Baby in the Family
Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings: How to Stop the Fighting and Raise Friends for Life by Dr. Laura Markham contains an excellent section (part three) on how to prepare for a new baby and integrate the baby into your family’s life.
Need help babyproofing? I was named a baby safety expert in a Redfin article! Check it out here: 22 Tips On Baby Proofing Apartments, Redfin (Parent company of ApartmentGuide and Rent.)
Racial Justice
Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria and Other Conversations about Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum is an excellent book for any parent seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America. Tatum guides readers in how to talk directly about racial and ethnic identities in order to bring about greater psychological health and help bridge the divisions in American society. I highly recommend video interviews of Beverly Daniel Tatum as well. She is a powerful, wise, and inspiring speaker.
What if I Say the Wrong Thing: 25 Habits for Culturally Effective People by Verña Myers is an excellent book full of key ideas, helpful stories, and positive steps all of us can take to learn, act, and speak in ways that build connection and reduce prejudice and misunderstandings. I have attended a workshop with Myers and used her book to lead a series on “Antiracism for Parents” at temples, libraries and schools.
So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Uluo is an excellent book for adults to educate themselves and others, which is an essential step if you want to talk with your children about race and racism.
Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey is a helpful book for parents of white children who want to name the privilege of white hierarchy and raise children who can stand up against racism.

Debby Irving, a racial justice educator and writer has a great book, website, and set of challenges to grow one’s skills to stand up for racial justice.

Sibling Relationships
Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings: How to Stop the Fighting and Raise Friends for Life by Dr. Laura Markham is an excellent book on how to use and teach self-regulation, connection and coaching to help children get along with more empathy and cooperation. Dr. Markham’s guidance is helpful for both your own children and children at play dates.
Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live, Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish is a wise, enjoyable book that gives parents practical tools for parenting well. They feature memorable cartoons to help you remember how to cope with conflict, facilitate cooperation, reduce rivalry and increase partnership and happiness between siblings.
Spiritual Education
Nurturing Spirituality in Children: Simple Hands-On Activities by Peggy Jenkins, Ph.D. is full of wonderful hands-on activities you can do with children in 10 minutes or less. I have used this book to inspire memorable activities in Interfaith children’s classes, school clubs, and family group classes. Metaphors and activities offer powerful ways to explain abstract ideas to children.
The Family Virtues Guide: Simple Ways to Bring Out the Best in Our Children and Ourselves by Linda Kavelin Popov, co-founder of The Virtues Project, offers succinct and child-friendly lessons on 52 virtues including definitions, discussion questions, scenarios, and quotes from the world’s religions. It can be used by families, schools, and multicultural, interfaith groups. I learned about this book when teaching at an international school in Chile that focused on a virtue each week of the year, and have used it to structure my Peacemakers family and children’s classes for years.
Using Imagination
The Power of Your Child’s Imagination: How to Transform Stress and Anxiety into Joy and Success by Charlotte Reznick, PhD is full of beautiful ways you can empower your children to use their imagination when they are facing all sorts of worries and fears, including bed-wetting, sleep, school stress, panic, phobias, squabbles with friends, and more. My clients who have tried some of the ideas have found them to be “magical.”
parenting all ages
Parenting All Ages
Foundational Parenting Strategies
The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson, PhD will help you learn how to use the quality of your presence to help your child feel the four S’s (Safe, Seen, Soothed and Secure) that bring about healthy development and long-lasting high quality relationships. Enjoy Siegel and Payne Bryson’s stories, scripts, strategies, and illustrations that bring their brilliant ideas to life. Even though this book is written for parents of younger children, it is full of wisdom for parenting all ages.
The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson, PhD is full of excellent core strategies that make this book a game-changer. Memorable stories from their own lives will inspire your parenting during stressful moments. I have used ideas from this book with my own children and shared them with clients for years.

The strategies in these books apply not only to young children, but to teenagers and adult children as well. You can learn more about the incredible work of Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson on their helpful websites.

See resources in the Family Harmony Section as well.

Developmental Stages of Children
Your [Age]-Year-Old book series by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg is based on the research and observations of thousands of children. Each book focuses on one year of life for children ages 1–14. While they are dated (from the 1980s), they are full of knowledge, humor, and guidance that remains invaluable for parents as their children change over time. Plus, they’re inexpensive since you can buy them used! Example — Your Four Year Old: Wild and Wonderful by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg.
Parenting Young Children
Brain-Body Parenting: How to Stop Managing Behavior and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids by Mona Delahooke, PhD will help you understand and practice a new way of helping your children and yourself to access your best selves. She teaches “bottom up” approaches that use the body’s signals to help the mind and heart feel more at ease. This book is especially useful for helping children and adults learn to regulate their emotions more effectively.
Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting by Dr. Laura Markham will help you learn how to foster emotional connection with your young child to create lasting, effective changes in your family that become part of how you respond and support your child(ren) for years.

Aha Parenting — Dr. Laura Markham has created a fabulous website where you can type in a question and receive her answers written to parents who have asked related questions. My parenting philosophy is very aligned with hers, so I recommend her books and her website to my clients.

Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy teaches parents key principles to build resilience in children with wonderful specific guidance on a host of behaviors. My own parenting philosophy is very aligned with hers. She also has an excellent podcast and a membership program to access her many parenting courses, which several of my parent coaching clients have enjoyed.
No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson, PhD provides an effective road map for dealing with the big feelings of children in a compassionate, knowledgeable way that leads to opportunities for growth and connection between parent and child. Enjoy learning fascinating, sensible ways to lower the drama and increase the calm with your child.

Unruffled Podcast — Janet Lansbury teaches respectful parenting through inspiring responses to people who call in with all sorts of questions about raising young children. She has a very soothing, wise and calm voice and is the author of several inspiring books on parenting.

Parenting Pre-Teen & Teens
The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents by Lisa Damour, PhD is a superb and enjoyable resource to help parents understand their teenagers’ intense emotional lives and learn how to support them through this essential developmental stage of life. Dr. Damour’s website is full of helpful resources as well.
Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen: The Essential Conversations You Need to Have with Your Kids Before They Start High School by Michelle Icard is a wise and helpful guide on how to start the critical conversations we need to have with our teenagers and keep them going over the coming years. She offers useful relatable examples and memorable tips that can help you with kids of any age, even adults! See my blogs on her BRIEF conversation model and on her tips for opening conversations with teens for a taste of her approach.
What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home by William Stixrud, PhD and Ned Johnson is a wonderful guide to help you learn to engage in respectful and effective dialogue with kids, especially over age 10, when conversations often get thorny or drop off. Full of relatable stories, helpful dialogues, and insightful ways to give feedback, discuss boundaries, problem solve and more with more confidence and skill.
Staying Connected to Your Teenager, Revised Edition: How to Keep Them Talking to You and How to Hear What They’re Really Saying by Michael Riera, PhD offers illuminating support full of memorable and inspiring examples to help parents learn to shift from a “managing” to a “consulting” role in their teen’s life. Learn to follow their natural rhythms to bring about more connection and fun.
Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood by Lisa Damour, PhD helps parents recognize seven distinct developmental transitions that help girls grow into healthy adults – including Parting with Childhood, Contending with Adult Authority, Entering the Romantic World, and Caring for Herself. Damour offers realistic scenarios and conversations to help parents feel better and more able to support their daughters along this journey of adolescence. Many of her ideas and constructs apply to boys as well.
How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims is full of wonderful stories and practical alternative strategies to help parents learn to allow children to make their own mistakes and develop the resilience, resourcefulness, and inner drive necessary for success in adulthood.
Parenting Young Adults
The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now by Meg Jay is a much-appreciated book for young adults (and those who love them). Jay shares a fascinating exploration of how to live one’s twenties (and thirties!) well.
Your Turn: How to be an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims is a compassionate, personal, and practical guide for living a more authentic adulthood. She includes interviews with diverse young adults who have successfully launched their adult lives as well as key ideas for 20 and 30 somethings that parents can share with their adult children as well.
personal growth

Personal Growth

Knowing yourself
The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too) by Gretchen Rubin helps people understand the “four tendencies” — being an Obliger, Upholder, Questioner, or Rebel — and learn how to bring out the best in each person. Many of my clients have found this book to be very helpful in understanding both themselves and their family members.
Take Time for Your Life by Cheryl Richardson is an oldie, but a goodie that is excellent if you want guidance on how to get in touch with what matters most to you and live a more balanced life. It is full of helpful exercises that you can revisit whenever you need a tune-up on living in alignment with your values and priorities.

The Enneagram is a powerful way to understand yourself and the people in your life more fully. I recommend taking the RHETI test and then scheduling a call with me to talk through your results. I trained and got certified with Elaine Bailey to use the Enneagram in my coaching. My clients have found this perspective to be very useful and illuminating in personal and family growth and mutual understanding.

Mindful awareness
Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödron is full of helpful ideas from a Buddhist perspective on how to learn to understand, accept, and work with one’s humanity. Chödron is wonderfully honest and refreshing as she shares ways of working with anger, fear, jealousy, sadness, regret, and despair among other emotions.
Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness by Rick Hanson inspired a workshop I led on Mindfulness and Resilience for a group of physicians at Mass General Hospital. Hanson warmly shares concrete suggestions, personal stories, and experiential practices for building 12 inner strengths for resilience. You’ll learn how to manage your nervous systems and repair and deepen relationships more skillfully as you go through the ups and downs of life.

Tenpercenthappier app Dan Harris has an excellent podcast and app for meditation and learning from wise meditators and spiritual teachers around the world. I’ve been a member since 2021 and love the meditations, courses, and podcast on this app.

Self-Renewal
Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results by Robert E. Quinn is a timeless book illustrates how 8 “seed thoughts” drawn from the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. can help bring about powerful personal and organizational change. This book was one of the cornerstone books of my parent coaching training and its core ideas continue to inform my coaching approach. It is full of useful stories that stay with you and inspire your parenting long after you read the book.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear shares practical strategies to help readers form good habits, break bad ones and learn to shift tiny behaviors and create systems that can transform your life. Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, has an excellent succinct weekly newsletter as well. I often draw upon his ideas in my parent coaching sessions to help parents create healthy habits for themselves and their families.
The Adult Years: Mastering the Art of Self-Renewal by Frederic M. Hudson is a timeless classic with powerful ideas for personal growth and transformation throughout one’s adult life. This was a book from my parent coach training that I found to be deeply inspiring for my work with parents who want to develop and grow themselves as they parent.
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