Are You Shy? Núria Roca, illustrated by Marta Fàbrega, $8.50 (ages 4 to 7)

Extreme shyness can become a problem that affects a child’s social development. This book gives younger kids ways to cope with their shyness. A short section at the back of this book offers advice to parents.

The Attachment Connection: Parenting a Secure & Confident Child Using the Science of Attachment Theory. Ruth Newton, $21.95

The Attachment Connection sorts out the facts from the fiction about parent-child attachment and shows how paying attention to the emotional needs of your child, particularly during the first five years of development, can help him or her grow up happy, secure, and confident. You'll discover how your child's brain is developing at each stage of growth and learn to use reasonable, easy-to-implement guidelines based on sound science to foster secure attachment, healthy social skills, and emotional regulation in your child.

The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children. Wendy Mogel, $17.50

A practical and refreshing antidote to anxious over-parenting, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee is itself a blessing — pointing the way to raising self-reliant, compassionate and ethical children.

Building Emotional Intelligence: Techniques to Cultivate Inner Strength in Children. Linda Lantieri & Daniel Goleman, $26.50

What's the most important piece of your child's educational experience? If you think it's math, science, or reading, you might be overlooking an element that is fast becoming essential in today's stressful world: the capacity known as "inner resilience." In Building Emotional Intelligence, pioneering educator Linda Lantieri joins forces with renowned psychologist Daniel Goleman to help children respond to and rebound from the challenges unique to the 21st century by teaching children how to quiet their minds, calm their bodies, and manage their emotions more skillfully.

Linda Lantieri's proven techniques for increasing self-esteem, improving concentration and awareness, and enhancing empathy and communication are complemented by a spoken-word CD with exercises presented by Daniel Goleman.

Raising confident, motivated, and caring children is a parent’s greatest challenge. Drawing on her own extensive research on children and parents, Terri Apter has created a guide based on “emotional coaching”—learning to respond appropriately to a child’s feelings—that helps parents raise children to solve problems, to be socially active and understand others, and to manage emotions, all of which are crucial to developing confidence and functioning successfully in society. Hugely insightful, reassuring, and accessible, The Confident Child is a truly necessary parenting guide.

Dealing with Disappointment: Helping Kids Cope When Things Don't Go Their Way. Elizabeth Crary, $14.95

This practical, easy-to-read guide walks parents through the concept of emotional competency, which begins by teaching children to identify and acknowledge their feelings. It provides exercises and examples that demonstrate how children - even toddlers - can cope with their emotions, using self-calming techniques (exercise or a few minutes with a favorite book, for example) and problem-solving tools. Parents who to often find themselves overwhelmed by frustrated children will appreciate the step-by-step recommendations.

Family Activism: Empowering Your Community, Beginning with Family and Friends. Roberto Vargas, $19.95

We live in a world that needs radical transformation if our children and grandchildren are to live healthy, peace-filled lives. But where to start? In this inspiring new book, activist Roberto Vargas says the answer lies surprisingly close: at home, with our closest relationships. In our daily lives we experience countless opportunities to empower, inspire, and support positive change in those around us. In Family Activism Vargas explains how fostering what he calls familia—close, loving connections with our relatives and with those we choose to call family—can help us develop the skills and attitudes we need to tackle broader problems in our community, our nation, and the world.

Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking: Powerful, Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility and Happiness. Tamar Chansky, $17.00

Several years ago Dr. Tamar Chansky, a leading clinical expert on children and anxiety disorders, realized that roughly half of the children she sees in her clinical practice exhibit negative thinking. This negativity creates emotional hurdles that often hinder children from achieving success and happiness, both now and in the years to come.

Now in this landmark book, Dr. Chansky thoroughly analyzes the underlying causes of children’s negative attitudes and provides numerous strategies to help parents and their children manage negative thoughts, build optimism, and establish emotional resilience. She shows how to buffer kids from disappointment, failure, and frustration by helping them to think more accurately about their problems—to right-size them. Freeing your Child from Negative Thinking provides parents, caregivers, and clinicians with the tools they need to relieve a child from the burden of these emotional hurdles and to build the positive, confident mindset that will set them on their way to a bright, happy future.

Growing Up Resilient: Ways to Build Resilience in Children and Youth. Tatyana Barankin & Nazilla Khanlou, CAMH, $12.95

Resilience in child development is a much-talked about topic these days. Many people want to better understand what it is, how it is related to the healthy development of children and youth and what they can do to strengthen resilience in young people. This new booklet from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) guides parents, educators, child and youth workers and other professionals in understanding and supporting the individual, family and community roots of resilience.

Healing Stories: Picture Books for the Big and Small Changes in a Child's Life. Jacqueline Golding, $20.50

Healing Stories recommends over 500 carefully selected books that can be used to help children cope with the everyday challenges of childhood and with life-changing crises; while offering adults the information they need to make the right choices for their kids.

The Kid’s Guide to Service Projects: Over 500 Service Ideas for Young People Who Want to Make a Difference, 2nd Edition. Barbara Lewis, $19.99

Are you looking for ways to connect kids with inspiring, high-quality community service projects? Do you want fresh ideas and suggestions for how to get kids involved in service learning? Then this new edition of Barbara Lewis’s classic youth service guide is for you.

The Kid’s Guide to Service Projects contains hundreds of up-to-date service projects and ideas presented in an engaging, kid-friendly format. This guide has something for everyone who wants to make a difference. Features and benefits include over 500 service project ideas, from simple to large scale and step-by-step instructions for creating flyers, petitions, press releases, and more.

The book’s 14 thematic chapters cover topics commonly selected for community service projects. Each chapter includes important facts and statistics related to each topic, a host of diverse service project ideas, and listings of service organization contact information.

Animals • Community Development  • Crime Fighting  • The Environment  • Health & Wellness  • Homelessness  • Hunger  • Literacy  • People with Special Needs  • Seniors  • Politics & Government  • Safety  • Transportation  • Friendship

With the current increased focus on community service, this book is sure to motivate an audience of eager young change-makers. National award-winning author Barbara Lewis provides the ideas, tips, resources, and information kids need to get out there and make a difference today!

Kids Are Worth It: Raising Resilient, Responsible, Compassionate Kids, Revised 2010. Barbara Coloroso, $22.00

Barbara Coloroso delivers a powerful message that good parenting begins by treating kids with dignity and respect, giving them a sense of power in their own lives and offering them opportunities to make decisions, take responsibility for their actions and to learn from their mistakes. Rejecting the quick-fix solutions of punishment and rewards, Coloroso shows how to use the very stuff of family life to help you guide your children to become self-disciplined, responsible, resilient and compassionate human beings.

Lost and Found. Jennifer Moore-Mallinos, illustrated by Marta Fàbrega, $8.50 (ages 4 to 7)

Getting lost in a public place and being unable to find Mom or Dad is a frightening and potentially dangerous experience for younger children. This book tells children—and parents—what to do.

Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World. Craig Kielburger & Marc Kielburger, $22.99

For everyone who has ever yearned for a better life and a better world, Craig and Marc Kielburger share a blueprint for personal and social change that has the power to transform lives, one act at a time. Me to We is an approach to life that leads us to recognize what is truly valuable, make new decisions about the way we want to live, and re-define the goals we set for ourselves and the legacy we want to leave. Above all, it creates new ways of measuring happiness, meaning, and success in our lives, and makes sure these elusive goals are attainable at last.

The Mindful Child. Susan Kaiser Greenland, $19.99

How to help your kid manage stress and become happier, kinder and more compassionate.

Mindset. The New Psychology of Success. Carol Dweck, $19.95

Psychologist Carol Dweck explains why it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success — but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising intelligence and ability doesn’t foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. With the right mindset, we can motivate our kids and help them to raise their grades, as well as reach our own goals–personal and professional. Dweck reveals what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.

My Feeling Better Workbook: Activities that Help Kids Beat the Blues. Sarah Hamil, $19.95; Profession version with CDROM, $29.95

There are many ways to help children who are sad and depressed, and you might not even realize how much you can do to make your child feel better. By working through this book, guiding your child through just one activity a day, you can empower him or her with the skills necessary to overcome sadness and low self-esteem and live an active, joyful life.

Nurture the Nature: Understanding and Supporting Your Child's Unique Core Personality. Michael Gurian, $29.99

From Michael Gurian, the best-selling author of The Minds of Boys and The Wonder of Girls, comes the next-step book that shows how any parent can tune into a child’s unique core personality, hard wiring, temperament, and genetic predisposition in order to help that child flourish and thrive.

Based on the most recent brain research, Nurture the Nature features the Ten Tips for Nurturing the Nature of Your Baby, self-tests, checklists, and many other tools for you to help your kids get exactly the kind of support they need, from infants to adolescents. While offering positive ideas for nurturing your child, Gurian also shows how to avoid the stress, pressures, and excessive competition of what he identifies as ‘social trends parenting’ ... Gurian calls on parents to turn away from one-size-fits-all approaches and instead support the individual core nature of a child with effective and customized loving care.

The Optimistic Child: a Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience. Martin Seligman, $18.95

Dr. Martin Seligman offers parents, teachers, and coaches a well-validated program to prevent depression in children. In a thirty-year study, Seligman and his colleagues discovered the link between pessimism -- dwelling on the most catastrophic cause of any setback -- and depression. Seligman shows adults how to teach children the skills of optimism that can help them combat depression, achieve more on the playing field and at school, and improve their physical health.

A Parent’s Guide to Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Your Child Roots and Wings. Kenneth Ginsburg & Martha Jablow, $21.95

Today’s children face a great deal of stress—academic performance standards, heavy scheduling, media messages, peer pressure and family tension. Without healthier solutions, they often cope by talking back, giving up, or indulging in unhealthy behaviors. Help them learn to cope with proven strategies from one of the nation’s foremost experts in adolescent medicine. This plan for resilience can help kids from 18 months to 18 years build the crucial skills needed to bounce back from challenges and manage stress.

The Power of Your Child's Imagination: How to Transform Stress and Anxiety into Joy and Success. Charlotte Reznick, $18.50

Imagine your frustrated four-year-old calming her own anger with a few simple breaths. Picture your fourth grader visualizing an ice blue pillow to cool his hot headaches. Encourage your worried eleven-year-old to improve her concentration by consulting a personal wizard to help with homework.

The Power of Your Child’s Imagination will show you how to empower your child with easy, effective, and creative skills for surviving—and thriving—in a stressful world. This indispensable guide provides nine simple tools to help children cope with stress and anxiety by tapping into their imagination to access their own natural strength and confidence. Dr. Reznick illustrates how each tool can be used every day to deal with problems such as:

• Stress-induced headaches and stomachaches
• Phobias, panic attacks, and social anxiety
• Bed-wetting and sleepless nights
• Separation anxiety and fear of the unknown
• Coping with death, divorce, and other losses
• Hurt, frustration, and anger
• Trouble with schoolwork and concentration
• Sibling rivalry and school-yard squabbles

Raising Children Who Soar: a Guide to Healthy Risk-Taking in an Uncertain World. Susan Davis & Nancy Eppler-Wolf, $25.95

How can we keep children safe in an uncertain world, but also raise them to be confident in taking the healthy, emotional risks necessary to succeed in life? This book is a step-by-step look at how to help children become successful risk-takers: ready to leap at life’s opportunities and triumph over setbacks along the way.

Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. Christine Carter, $29.95

With great wit, wisdom, and compassion, Christine Carter covers the day-to-day pressure points of parenting—how best to discipline, get kids to school and activities on time, and get dinner on the table—as well as the more elusive issues of helping children build healthy friendships and develop emotional intelligence. In 10 key steps, she helps you interact confidently and consistently with your kids to foster the skills, habits, and mindsets that will set the stage for positive emotions now and into their adolescence and beyond. Complete with a series of “try this” tips, secrets, and strategies, Raising Happiness is a one-of-a-kind resource that will help you instill joy in your kids—and, in the process, become more joyful yourself.

Raising Kids In the 21st Century: the Science of Psychological Health for Children. Sharon Hall, $26.99

An easy-to-read guide on raising emotionally healthy children that is based on sound psychological research. The book’s format makes it a good choice for students, parents, or practitioners.

Raising an Optimistic Child: a Proven Plan for Depression-Proofing Young Children for Life. Bob Murray & Alicia Fortinberry, $19.95

Raising an Optimistic Child offers you tools for creating a positive, supportive family atmosphere that helps children who are already depressed and can even prevent this crippling disorder. Steps and additional techniques will help you combat your own depression, tackle parental issues, and enhance learning and coping skills. It also alerts you to circumstances that put a child at risk for depression and suggests ways to ward it off.

Raising a Self-Disciplined Child: Help Your Child Become More Responsible, Confident and Resilient. Robert Brooks & Sam Goldstein, $19.95

Raising a Self-Disciplined Child is a remarkably positive approach to a style of discipline that builds children up-from the acclaimed authors of Raising Resilient Children. Filled with realistic, practical strategies and sample scenarios, it shows you how to teach your child, ages 6 through 16, the value of self-control, self-reliance, and self-assurance: the all-important skills that will last a lifetime.

The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Workbook for Kids: Help for Children to Cope with Stress, Anxiety & Transitions. Lawrence Shapiro & Robin Sprague, $22.95

Children pay close attention to their parents' moods. When parents feel upset, their kids may become anxious, and when parents wind down, children also get the chance to relax. When you feel overwhelmed and stressed, it can be hard to help your child feel balanced. The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Workbook for Kids, written by two child therapists, offers more than fifty activities you can do together as a family to help you and your child replace stressful and anxious feelings with feelings of optimism, confidence, and joy.

You'll learn proven relaxation techniques, including deep breathing, guided imagery, mindfulness, and yoga, and then receive guidance for teaching them to your child. Your child will also discover how taking time to do art and creative projects can create a sense of fulfillment and calm. By completing just one ten-minute activity from this workbook each day, you'll make relaxation a family habit that will stay with both you and your child for a lifetime.

The Resilient Child: Seven Essential Lessons for Your Child’s Happiness and Success. George Everley, $17.00

Resiliency is what allows us to manage stress, to build stable relationships and to achieve success. The Resilient Child gives parents the tools to help children deal with life’s adversities, to develop strength of character, integrity, to make decisions and to problem-solve.

Safe Kids, Safe Families. Samantha Wilson, $19.95

Today’s kids and teens, despite being seemingly street smart and Internet savvy, are vulnerable to a frightening range of dangerous situations. How do we keep them safe, yet still allow their independence and confidence to grow? Author Samantha Wilson is a mother; the founder of Kidproof Canada and is a former police officer with specialized training in crimes against children. Safe Kids, Safe Families offers timely advice on:

• How to make the right choice
• Discerning perceived danger from the real thing
• Learning how to trust your instincts
• Teaching kids to avoid becoming a victim in the chat room, the school yard or the mall
• How to "read" your teens' friendships for potential unsafe behaviour

Sometimes I Get Sad (But Now I Know What Makes Me Happy). Jane Ratcliffe, $19.95

Childhood depression is much more common than most people realize.  Sometimes I Get Sad tells the story of Sara and her sadness.  With the aid of a counselor and a peer group, she learns how to make herself feel better and the skills she needs to manage her emotions.

Stress Relief: Ultimate Teen Guide. Mark Powell, $19.75

Stress Relief is not about managing stress, but rather about preventing and avoiding it and eliminating the feelings it causes. This is a clear and practical guide that is also challenging and inspiring. Packed with insightful thoughts, ideas, and techniques like breathing exercises, meditation, affirmation and creative visualization, Stress Relief empowers teens by giving them control over their lives.

Stressed Out Girls: Helping Them Thrive in the Age of Pressure. Roni Cohen-Sandler, $18.50

Increased competition and an emphasis on excelling at all costs is creating debilitating pressure for adolescent girls. Based on clinical work, interviews, and a comprehensive survey of 3,000 teens, Dr. Cohen-Sandler gives concerned parents and teachers invaluable insights into what makes girls particularly vulnerable to harmful stress, the knowledge to identify those at greatest risk, and practical strategies to reduce their stress, build resiliency, and bolster self-confidence.

Too Safe for Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive. Michael Ungar, $22.99

Internationally respected social worker and family therapist Michael Ungar tells us why our mania to keep our kids safe is causing us to do the opposite - put them in harm’s way. By continuing to protect them from failure and disappointment, many of our kids are missing out on the “risk-taker’s advantage,” the benefits that come from experiencing manageable amounts of danger. In Too Safe for Their Own Good, Ungar inspires parents to recall their own childhoods and the lessons they learned from being risk-takers and responsibility-seekers, much to the annoyance of their own parents. He offers the support parents need in setting appropriate limits and provides concrete suggestions for allowing children the opportunity to experience the rites of passage that will help them become competent, happy, thriving adults.

In our mania to provide emotional life jackets around our kids, helmets and seatbelts, approved playground equipment, after-school supervision, an endless stream of evening programming, and no place to hang out but the tiled flooring of our local mall, we parents are accidentally creating a generation of youth who are not ready for life. Our children are too safe for their own good.

—From Too Safe for Their Own Good

Under Pressure: Putting the Child Back in Childhood. Carl Honoré, $21.00

A fascinating and urgent look at childhood today and how we are raising a generation of over-managed, overprotected and overindulged children. Carl Honoré shows how our modern approach to parenting is backfiring, leaving our kids less capable and resilient than past generations. With insight, research findings and common sense, he proposes clear-sighted changes for parents and educators and all concerned with the health and well-being of our children.

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake? Toni Morrison & Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre, $29.99

Generation after generation, classic fables, folklore, and myth remain popular because they quicken the imagination of readers and listeners of all ages. In Who's Got Game, the stories were inspired by Aesop's fables and are cleverly presented with graphic-novel style illustrations.