What's the best resource for parents trying to raise healthy, secure kids in the midst of global and perhaps personal uncertainty? The round-the-clock advice available online is, at best, a mix of reputable and questionable; in a marketplace swollen with about as many opinions as there are baby names, those in the book business must work to bring the most compelling and trustworthy voices to print.
Most publishers say that whether the goal is a new toilet-training technique or finding 10 minutes' peace, moms and dads aren't buying the idea of a magic bullet. “I think parenting has entered the age of honesty,” says Chronicle Books publishing director Mikyla Bruder. “There's so much advice out there, and a real suspicion [of] people who seem to have all the answers.”
All this candor has produced more books that both consider the unique dynamics between parent and child and focus exclusively on parents' needs. “It's not just correcting behavior,” says Da Capo editor Katie McHugh. “It's how you influence it.” And there's also a silver lining to all the economic doom and gloom: significantly less emphasis on the status-driven quest of the Superparent to cultivate the Superkid. PW spoke with a variety of authors, editors and publishers to find out what else is working—and what's next.
Birth and Breast-feeding
The mysterious initial stages of parenthood are well-covered territory: parents know, quite literally, What to Expect, but publishers who think there's more to the story see a good opportunity to tell it. Actress Ricki Lake and filmmaker Abby Epstein first explored the state of maternity care in the U.S. for their 2008 documentary, The Business of Being Born, which covered in part Lake's decision to deliver her second child at home. When postscreening q&a's revealed just how little women knew about their birth options, the duo decided to write a book.
Grand Central's Wellness Central imprint will publish the pair's Your Best Birth: Know All Your Options, Discover the Natural Choices, and Take Back the Birth Experience. Another well-researched perspective is Ballantine's Birth Day by Mark Sloan—a pediatrician who has attended nearly 3,000 births.
An early-parenting decision that is, in some circles, as charged as certain labor and delivery choices, is breast-feeding. The Harvard Common Press, well-known for such guides as The Nursing Mother's Companion, takes a different approach to the process with Unbuttoned: Women Open Up About the Pleasures, Pains, and Politics of Breastfeeding, a personal essay collection from authors like Julia Glass and Rachel Sarah, whose “Lust and the Lactating Mother” was excerpted recently in Salon.
Boys and Girls Together
There's been considerable ink spilled in recent years on gender difference in parenting; this year, several books look beyond dolls and toy trucks to specific issues facing girls and boys at different stages of development. Ballantine has published The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today's Pressures by Stephen Hinshaw, professor and chair of the psychology department at UC Berkeley, with Rachel Kranz. The book suggests that today's social and cultural pressures send conflicting messages to teen girls, who struggle to maintain a standard of perfection in appearance, academics and athletics.
Da Capo also tackles the subject of harmfully high standards in You'd Be So Pretty If..: Teaching Our Daughters to Love Their Bodies—Even When We Don't Love Our Own by Dara Chadwick. “As much as you think your daughter doesn't care about what you're saying, everyone has a memory—I certainly have many—of what their mom said to them or what their grandmother commented on,” says editor Katie McHugh. “And these experiences add up to your view of yourself.”
Which isn't to say that 2009 is the year of the girl: “I think the pendulum swings back and forth,” says Ballantine senior editor Jill Schwartzman, “since both boys and girls have their own unique problems.” Jossey-Bass will publish The Purpose of Boys: Helping Our Sons Find Meaning, Significance, and Direction in Their Lives by Michael Gurian, who details the neurological development of boys and the difficulties they confront on their way to adolescence, and emphasizes the importance of purpose in their success and happiness. “It's about teaching boys the skills they need to build character, motivation and a sense of mission in their lives,” says executive editor Alan Rinzler.
Pink Brain, Blue Brain, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, also examines brain development, focusing on the earliest stages. Author Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist, argues that boys and girls are born with very small and specific disparities in brain structure and size, and that later behavioral differences are shaped more by environment than previously understood. She offers concrete ways that parents can influence their children's outlook, beginning at birth.
Safety First
Plugged in 24/7, today's kids come of age at the pace of their high-speed Internet connection. A new group of books can help parents navigate the unknown without alienating themselves in the process. “Information about drugs is easier for your child to get than ever before,” says Michelle Howry, senior editor at Touchstone Fireside. “But there's an upside for parents—the increase in access offers more ways to engage your child.” In How to Raise a Drug-Free Kid, author Joseph Califano, founder and head of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, offers research-based, concrete ideas about engaging your kids in meaningful discussions about drugs and alcohol.
Los Angeles County deputy district attorney Robin Sax, who specializes in child sexual assault cases and who is the author of Predators and Child Molesters: What Every Parent Needs to Know to Keep Kids Safe, agrees that parents should see the Web as a tool rather than a threat: “There's no better way to communicate than learning their language,” she says. Her work, published by Prometheus Books, answers 100 questions that she's most often encountered in her 15 years on the job.
For parents who are struggling to discuss sex with their kids—and especially for those who may discover suddenly that they're far beyond birds-and-bees territory—Fair Winds Press offers My Teen Has Had Sex, Now What Do I Do? “It's a tough situation with a lot of emotions involved,” says publisher Will Kiester. This book is less about what to say than how to say it, according to Kiester: “It doesn't make the teens out to be wrong, and it gives parents the confidence to say what they need to say at the right time.”
Though a close eye is key, some experts suggest that a slight loosening of the reins may work better. Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, published by Jossey-Bass, suggests that parents' attempts to eliminate danger from their children's lives may actually inhibit them. “There's a trend away from the worried, over-controlling, intrusive, hovering 'helicopter' parent and a new interest in letting kids be themselves at their own speed, with their own temperament and special strengths,” says executive editor Alan Rinzler. “Parents still need to be parents, but in a manner that leads to the inevitable separation every kid needs to grow up.”
And in If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay (Wellness Central), former New York City emergency room pediatrician Lara Zibners spells out when it's safe to lighten up. Says Zibners, “There's stuff in the news about kids getting the flu and dying, so every kid who has a fever is rushed to the emergency room.” In many cases, she says, the science says that there's absolutely no need for such panic.
What's So Funny?
First-person and often humorous takes on parenting are cropping up everywhere, their popularity stoked by the no-holds-barred honesty found online. “Because parents are ever searching for guidance, the army of mommy bloggers are ever ready to keep pushing the books that seem to really help,” says Broadway Books editor-in-chief Stacey Creamer. “This is true in the case of Rattled! by Christine Coppa... which stems from Coppa's highly trafficked blog with Glamour magazine, Storked!” Simon Spotlight Entertainment is publishing It Sucked and Then I Cried, a memoir from dooce.com creator Heather Armstrong. “These works offer welcome perspective and a somewhat voyeuristic trial run of the cherished highs, surprises and occasional messiness of motherhood,” says senior editor Patrick Price. And Rosy Ngo, senior editor at Clarkson Potter, which will publish the humorous how-to book If You Give a Mom a Martini, puts an even finer point on it: “It's hard not to have a sense of humor when you are totally consumed by the color of poop.”
Chronicle, which continues to see great success with backlist titles like The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Parenting and The Three-Martini Playdate, will launch a publishing program with Babble.com this fall. Their initial offering is a collection of the best essays from the site's Bad Parent column. But first, they'll roll out I'd Trade My Husband for a Housekeeper, which publishing director Bruder says “tackles the marital relationship with humor and empathy. I think it'll resonate especially well with career women, who are juggling so many things and who are admitting to their girlfriends in private that the priorities in their life rank (1) kids, (2) career and (3) husband—in that order.”
But the Web is certainly not the sole source of funny parent fodder. Every six weeks, Hollywood comedian Dani Klein produces Afterbirth, a live storytelling show featuring well-known artists' original pieces about parenthood. The show will be adapted into an anthology published by St. Martin's. Says executive editor Elizabeth Beier, “In many parenting books or magazines, the parent is the straight man—the one acting rational. But these writers are willing to let themselves look terrible, to display their deepest insecurities and fears... and to leaven it with humor.”
Though there is no shortage of clever mommy memoirs, this may be the year daddies get their due. Just in time for Father's Day, Norton will release Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, in which author Michael Lewis (Moneyball; The Blind Side) shares his written record of exactly what happened after the births of each of his three children.
One of the more innovative offerings in the parenting/humor subgenre is The Passion of the Hausfrau, a memoir/graphic novel hybrid from Villard. It's a tongue-in-cheek take on the classic Hero's Journey in illuminated manuscript form. “Every page offers something delightful,” says executive editor Marnie Cochran. Designed to be read in fits and starts—behind the bedroom or bathroom door or during naptime, “it's wild—chaotic and confusing and hilarious and weird and hard,” says Cochran. “All of those things that motherhood is.”
Helping Parents, Helping Kids
Several new parenting books are targeted toward the unique needs of mom and dad, written with the understanding that when these are met, kids thrive. The Military Father is the seventh in Armin Brott's New Father series published by Abbeville Press. In his introduction, Brott, a former Marine, writes: “Starting in 2001 I began [getting questions] like, 'My Marine unit is shipping out to Afghanistan next month, and I'm going to miss the birth of my baby. What can I do to remain close to my wife?' ” Nearly 40% of active duty, reserve and National Guard personnel have children, he says, and most of the resources available are aimed at the stay-at-home parent, rather than the one who is deployed. “I wanted to emphasize throughout the book that it's not only military people that we're talking to,” says Brott. “There are about as many civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan—in a similar situation, but in some ways worse because they don't have the support structure in place.”
Red Wheel/Weiser's Conari Books will publish Easy Does It, Mom: Parenting in Recovery, written by longtime counselor and family coach Barbara Joy. “There have not been many books at all, ever, that deal with the particular issues that women in recovery have—especially women who are parents in recovery,” says publisher Jan Johnson. “This is a warm and straightforward book with real-world suggestions for both moms and kids.”
No matter what else a parent is facing, negotiating the business of raising a child can be a challenge. “There is a paucity of personal finance books for parents, which is shocking given that children are so expensive,” says Crown associate editor Lindsay Orman. “The average family spends between $11,000 and $16,000 during a baby's first year and more than $200,000 by the child's 18th birthday.” Orman says The Wall Street Journal Financial Guidebook for New Parents advises parents to prioritize in order to shoulder the astronomical cost of child care and to answer the bigger-picture questions of college and retirement.
Of course, reaching these benchmarks takes more than a budget—it takes hard work, and in many cases full-time work from both adults in a two-parent household. Bantam just published Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have It All by Sharing It All, based on research from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Developments as well as the authors' own. “I think it's a fresh new approach since a lot of the books have been about the war between the sexes: who should be doing what, why aren't you doing this, pointing fingers,” says senior editor Danielle Perez. “This book acknowledges that career and family are equally important to moms and dads and offers a plan for answering: how are we going to make it work and how are we going to make it great?”
Gotham Books will offer an exploration of women's lifelong relationships with work by a neuroscientist and teacher who faced a crossroads after becoming a mother: “I didn't realize it was going to be an identity crisis for me, leaving behind a career, even for a short period of time,” says Amy Tiemann. She says that Mojo Mom: Nurturing Yourself While Raising a Family is the guide she wished she had. “It's about giving yourself permission to take the time to explore new things and figure out which parts you want to hold on to,” she says.
And for those parents whose biggest challenge may be translating what comes out of their teen's mouth (or figuring out exactly why they must wear that thing), a playful new series from Red Rock Press offers solutions: Living with... an Emo Kid, ... a Gamer and ...the Next Big Thing: Diva Division.
Yours, Mine and Ours: A New Values System
Many moms and dads find themselves navigating society's veritable obsession with the stuff of parenting—from the Bugaboo strollers to Bratz dolls to the brand-name college education and beyond. Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture by Allison J. Pugh, from the University of California Press, examines this trend and offers some surprising reasons behind parents' motivation to put their kids' material needs first. “You can't ignore the power of enormous corporate marketing budgets,” says Pugh, who spent three years observing and interviewing children and their families. But what it really comes down to is “parents' fears of their children being different. They're listening when their children say, 'I need this to fit in and feel normal,' and a lot of [their response] has to do with their memories of feeling different—these moments of shame, as isolated as they were, really burned into their memories.”
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt executive editor Deanne Urmy suggests that recent current events may also serve as a wakeup call for parents: “Given the number of recent institutional collapses and scandals, we see parents searching for books that take a fresh look at raising moral children.” The Parents We Mean to Be by Harvard University psychologist Richard Weissbourd emphasizes the extent to which parents shape their children's value systems and suggests that too much fixation on being a “great parent” can harm a kid's self-esteem and even their morality. Says Urmy: “Bennett-like books that 'teach values' seem simplistic; books that talk about moral and emotional development in more complex terms are appealing to more parents now.”
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