Parenting
Parenting calls forth our deepest capacity for connection and care while simultaneously surfacing our own unmet childhood needs and implicit memories. While parenting can be particularly challenging when our own developmental experiences didn’t provide the attunement and security we needed, being a parent also offers us an opportunity to increase our self-awareness, heal old wounds and become more free. These books offer science-based guidance grounded in attachment science, nervous system regulation, and child and adolescent development, along with compassionate support for reflecting on your own parenting journey. They honor both the universal challenges and joys of raising children and offer specific guidance for healing through the parenting journey so that we can better attune to our children, strengthen our relationships, and parent with more connection and ease.
The Whole-Brain Child: Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind
Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. Best Selling Author of MINDSIGHT and Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D.
A practical guide to understanding how different parts of the brain develop and how to support brain integration and positive child development. Siegel and Payne-Bryson offer specific strategies for helping children develop emotional intelligence, self-regulation, and resilience through everyday interactions.
Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive: 10th Anniversary Edition
Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. and Mary Hartzell, M.Ed.
The research is clear that even if we did not have secure relationships with our primary caregivers, we can still offer this to our child if we reflect on and make sense of our own childhood experience. This foundational book explores how our own childhood experiences shape our parenting, often outside of conscious awareness. Siegel and Hartzell offer a pathway for making sense of our own stories so we can parent with greater clarity, attunement, and intention.
Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting
Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn
The Kabat-Zinns bring mindfulness practice into the daily experience of parenting, reframing ordinary moments as opportunities for presence and connection. They offer a contemplative approach that honors both the challenges and the sacred dimensions of raising children
Brain-Body Parenting: How to Stop Managing Behavior and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids
Mona Delahooke, Ph.D Author of Beyond Behavior
Delahooke revolutionizes our understanding of children’s behavior by focusing on what’s happening in their nervous systems rather than just their actions – demonstrating how all behavior is communication. She offers a compassionate, neuroscience-informed approach that helps parents respond to the meaning beneath behaviors and support their children’s regulation.
Untangled Guiding teenage girls through the seven transitions into adulthood
Lisa Damour, Ph.D
Damour maps the seven essential developmental transitions of adolescent girls, from pulling away from parents to navigating peer relationships to entering the romantic world. Combining developmental research with compelling real-world stories from her clinical practice, she helps parents understand what’s happening beneath the surface of their daughters’ behavior and offers practical, compassionate guidance for supporting girls through each predictable stage. This book demystifies the teenage years, showing parents how to stay connected while honoring their daughters’ developmental need for autonomy and identity formation.
Trauma-Proofing Your Kids: A Parents' Guide for Instilling Confidence, Joy, and Resilience
Peter A. Levine Author of Walking the Tiger: Healing Trauma and Maggie Kline Author of Trauma Through a Child's Eyes
From the founder of Somatic Experiencing, this book is a practical, preventative guide for parents on building resilience and offering “emotional first aid” for everyday upsets, teaching stress management skills. teaches parents how to help children process difficult experiences before they become lasting trauma. Levine and Kline offer simple, body-based tools that support resilience and help children return to regulation after frightening or overwhelming events.
The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children
Ross W. Greene, Ph.D.
Greene’s revolutionary approach reframes “difficult” behavior as a signal that kids lack the skills to meet expectations. His collaborative problem-solving model offers an alternative to reward-and-punishment approaches, honoring children’s agency while teaching the skills they need.
Parenting a Child Who Has Intense Emotions: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Help Your Child Regulate Emotional Outbursts and Aggressive Behaviors
Path Harvey, LCSW-C and Jeanine A. Penzo, LICSW
For parents of children who experience emotional intensity, this book offers dialectal behavioral therapy (DBT)-informed strategies for validation, emotion coaching, and crisis management. It provides hope and practical tools for families navigating the particular challenges of raising emotionally sensitive children.
Trauma Through a Child's Eyes: Awakening the Ordinary Miracle of Healing
Peter A. Levine Author of Walking the Tiger: Healing Trauma and Maggie Kline
In this comprehensive guide, Levine and Kline help parents and professionals understand how children experience trauma, how it can get ‘stuck’ in the body and what supports their healing. They offer practical, body-based tools for recognizing trauma responses in children and supporting their natural capacity for recovery, helping to prevent overwhelming experiences from becoming lasting wounds.
The Power of Showing Up: How parental presence shapes who our kids become and how their brains get wired
Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. and Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D.
This book describes the importance of parental presence and creating a secure attachment with a child to foster healthy emotional and neurological development. The core message is that parents do not need to be perfect, but must be consistently and emotionally available.This accessible book distills attachment science into four essential elements: safety, seen, soothed, and secure. Siegel and Payne Bryson show how consistently “showing up” in these ways creates the foundation for lifelong mental health and resilience.
No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind
Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. and Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D.
Siegel and Payne Bryson offer a brain-based approach to discipline that builds connection rather than using punishment or rewards. They show how moments of conflict can become opportunities for teaching, learning, and deepening the parent-child relationship when we understand what’s happening in the developing brain.
Parenting in an Unjust World
Raising children to be aware of and know how to protect themselves and their peers in the context of systemic oppression – including racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia requires particular awareness, skills, and courage. These books offer guidance for parents navigating the essential work of helping children understand and resist injustice while developing healthy identities and the skills needed to lead positive social change in their schools and communities.
Websites With Helpful Resources for Parents:
Child Mind Institute
Child Mind Institute Resource Library includes topics such as: Anxiety Resources for Parents, ADHD, Depression and Mood Disorders, Drugs and Alcohol, Eating Disorders, Trauma & Grief …and many other topics.
Mindsight Institute
Dan Siegel and Caroline Welch’s Mindsight Institute, focused on making the science of well-being and mental health accessible for professional and personal development – includes links to books, trainings, and guided practices including the Wheel of Awareness practice.