PARENT ED RESOURCES

BOOKS

  • Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be

    Dr. Becky Kennedy provides a practical perspective for strengthening resilience for children and parents. Her salient advice normalizes parents' experiences. Parents will learn strategies to effectively manage challenges with empathy while remaining a trusted authority in children’s lives. Good Inside is a must read for parents of all ages.

  • How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success

    How to Raise an Adult has been a must read at Cliff Valley for several years. Julie Lythcott-Haims provides extensive research and rationale for promoting independence, critical thinking, and executive function skill development as crucial for lifelong success. She notes several factors including parental and societal factors that undermine children’s growth and development. How to Raise an Adult offers critical insights and essential information to support the competencies and resilience that children need to be truly successful in life.

  • Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

    After decades of research, Dr. Carol Dweck offers clinical insights and practical advice for how our mindsets impact our work, relationships, and wellness. She shows how having a growth mindset contributes to success in all areas of life. People with a fixed mindset, a belief that abilities are fixed, tend to shy away from challenges and inhibit potential. Those with a growth mindset believe that talents and abilities are the starting point and with practice, effort, and dedication one can continue to grow and learn throughout their entire lives.

  • The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Survive Everyday Parenting Struggles, and Help Your Family Thrive

    Parenting is hard, but it is easier when we have an understanding for why children act the way they do. The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. and Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D. is an insightful and accessible guide for grasping basic concepts in neurodevelopment of children. Through specific strategies based in neuroscience, parents will gain useful tools that support emotional intelligence and resilience in their children.

  • Scaffold Parenting: Raising Resilient, Self-Reliant, and Secure Kids in an Age of Anxiety

    Dr. Harold Koplewicz is the founding president and medical director of the renowned Child Mind Institute. In Scaffold Parenting, he provides an expert perspective on child development. His advice is practical, effective, and research based. Dr. Koplewicz gives parents the tools to be empathic, firm, and supportive to foster resilience and well-being.

BOOKS FOR ADOLESCENT AGE

  • Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain

    In Brainstorm, Dr. Daniel Siegel illuminates how brain development impacts teenagers’ behavior and relationships. Drawing on important new research in the field of interpersonal neurobiology, he explores exciting ways in which understanding how the teenage brain functions can help parents make what is in fact an incredibly positive period of growth, change, and experimentation in their children’s lives less lonely and distressing on both sides of the generational divide.

  • Attack of the Teenage Brain: Understanding and Supporting the Weird and Wonderful Adolescent Learner

    Whether you're a parent interacting with one adolescent or a teacher interacting with many, you know teens can be hard to parent and even harder to teach. The eye-rolling, the moodiness, the wandering attention, the drama. It's not you, it's them. More specifically, it's their brains.

  • The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults

    Dr. Frances E. Jensen is chair of the department of neurology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. As a mother, teacher, researcher, clinician, and frequent lecturer to parents and teens, she is in a unique position to explain to readers the workings of the teen brain. In The Teenage Brain, Dr. Jensen brings to readers the astonishing findings that previously remained buried in academic journals.

  • The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents

    Dr. Lisa Damour’s latest New York Times best seller is an urgently needed guide to help parents understand their teenagers’ intense and often fraught emotional lives—and how to support them through this critical developmental stage.

VIDEO

  • TED Talk: The Power of Yet

    Stanford University professor, Carol Dweck, explains why mindsets matter and how we can foster growth mindset in our children.

ARTICLES

PODCASTS

  • The Brain Architects: Building Resilience Through Play

    Dr. Jack Shonkoff explains the role of play in supporting resilience and five experts share their ideas and personal stories about applying the science of play in homes, communities, and crisis environments around the world.

  • The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

    You might think you know what it takes to lead a happier life… more money, a better job, or Instagram-worthy vacations. You’re dead wrong.

  • Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Raising Teens and Tweens

    Raising kids can be a bumpy, stressful, and uncertain process – which is why Lisa’s podcast brings her sane, informed, and practical perspective to your timely and timeless parenting questions.

  • Good Inside with Dr. Becky

    Tune into a weekly parenting podcast to hear real parents’ questions answered directly by Dr. Becky.

WEBSITES

  • Good Inside is the expert-guided, community-powered platform equipping parents with a new way of seeing and solving challenges at home.

  • The mission of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University is to drive science-based innovation that achieves breakthrough outcomes for children facing adversity.

  • The Child Mind Institute is dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders by giving them the help they need. They’ve become the leading independent nonprofit in children’s mental health by providing gold-standard evidence-based care, delivering educational resources to millions of families each year, training educators in underserved communities, and developing tomorrow’s breakthrough treatments.

  • The Wait Until 8th program encourages parents to delay giving children a smartphone until at least the end of 8th grade. It also provides alternatives to smartphones so that you can still be in touch with your child when needed.