Assessment of Parenting Competency in Mothers with Mental Illness. Teresa Ostler, $38.95

The stakes are undeniably high when it comes to deciding whether a mother with mental illness can raise her child in a safe, nurturing environment. Now, mental health professionals will have sound assessment strategies that fairly evaluate the parenting competency of mothers with a wide range of mental illnesses, from "baby blues" to schizophrenia.

Going beyond measuring only the mother's degree of mental illness, the safety of the environment, or the rate of child development, this groundbreaking resource integrates multiple approaches so that professionals understand the full picture of parenting competency. With this much-needed resource, psychologists, social workers, nurses, and child welfare professionals will be primed to conduct more accurate assessments, make informed decisions, build stronger mother-child relationships, and facilitate family preservation whenever possible.

Birth and Parenting Skills: New Directions in Antenatal Care. Mary Nolan & Julie Foster, editors. $49.95

A research-based account of the current status of antenatal education in the UK, Birth and Parenting Skills focuses on the key challenges faced by educators everywhere, and offers innovative suggestions for how these challenges might best be met. It describes approaches to accessing vulnerable groups of parents and how collaboration between medical, midwifery and educational models might result in a better service for pregnant women and their families. Effective and best practices are viewed within the principles and practices of adult education and how they should inform antenatal education.

Charting the Bumpy Road of Coparenthood: Understanding the Challenges of Family Life. James McHale, $39.50

Filled with interviews with new parents and observations of new parents and their babies, this major new study offers key information that clinicians, policymakers, and parents need to know about creating consistent and coordinated co-parenting strategies during pregnancy and in a child’s earliest years. Author James McHale explains how parents work together — or don’t — to care for infants and young children, and how the quality of their co-parenting alliance affects toddlers’ social and emotional development.”

Collaborating with Parents to Reduce Children's Behavior Problems: a Book for Therapists Using the Incredible Years® Program. Carolyn Webster-Stratton, $42.95

This important book has a unique approach with two areas of focus. First, it allows parents to tell their stories: sharing what it is like to have a “problem” child as well as the long and painful route to finding support and recovery through parent and child training. The book also elucidates in detail the “collaborative process” of therapists working together with families. This process combines the knowledge and expertise of the clinician with the unique strengths, perspectives, culture and goals of parents.

As active partners in the therapy process, parents learn parenting strategies to cope effectively with their child and strengthen their relationship as well as build support networks. Examples of when and how to add adjunct therapies such as child and teacher training are also discussed, providing a comprehensive guide for the collaborative process for therapists using the Incredible Years programs.

Developmental Parenting: a Guide for Early Childhood Practitioners. Lori Roggman, Lisa Boyce & Mark Innocenti, $45.95

When parents are warm, responsive, encouraging, and communicative — the key elements of developmental parenting — they lay the foundation for young children's school readiness, social competence, and mental health. That's why every early childhood professional needs this comprehensive, practical guide to building a developmental parenting program for the families they serve.

Unlike other approaches that limit parents to a "student" role, the proven parenting-focused model in this book shows home visitors how to put parents and other caregivers confidently in charge of guiding and supporting their young children's development. With this research-based and reader-friendly book, early childhood professionals will learn to put parents in charge of guiding their child's development — resulting in strong parent-child bonds, healthy families, and improved school readiness.

Early Intervention with Multi-Risk Families: an Integrative Approach. Sarah Landy & Rosanne Menna, $60.50

Helping families who live in environments with multiple risk factors — including poverty, domestic violence, teen parenthood, mental illness, and substance abuse — requires that professionals and paraprofessionals work together to provide the best possible interventions. This much-needed book shows service providers how to help these multi-risk families by using an integrative model that brings together the most effective intervention techniques from a variety of theoretical approaches, parenting strategies, and innovative programs. Professionals will learn how to effectively engage parents if they are resistant to intervention, and they'll discover specific, practical ways to help parents:

• become more self reflective about their parenting and empathetic toward their children
• examine and gain control over their defenses and ways of dealing with stress that are negatively influencing their parenting
• strengthen their sense of competence and social support
• develop positive perceptions of their children
• deal with unresolved loss and trauma
• enhance their interactions with their children
• regulate their own emotions and those of their children
• develop good planning and problem-solving skills

Everyday Parenting: a Professional's Guide to Building Family Management Skills. Thomas Dishion, Elizabeth Stormshak & Kathryn Kavanagh, $36.95

The EVERYDAY PARENTING program can be used for guiding individual family therapy, leading parent groups, and training counselors to work collaboratively with parents. This session-based approach is divided into three areas of skills based on the concept of mindful parenting: supporting positive behavior, setting healthy limits, and building family relationships by helping parents change interaction patterns that occur daily in families and relationships. An accompanying CD contains printable forms and handouts.

The Evidence-Based Parenting Practitioner's Handbook. Kirsten Asmussen, $63.50

THE EVIDENCE-BASED PARENTING PRACTITIONER'S HANDBOOK provides a comprehensive overview of the knowledge necessary to effectively deliver evidence-based parenting interventions within community and health settings. Using clear examples of how this knowledge can inform frontline work with parents.

Emphasizing the ways in which practitioners can evaluate and translate messages from research into applied work with parents and families, the book is suitable for all those involved in the delivery of evidence-based parenting support, including frontline practitioners, service managers, heads of children's services and policy makers.

Family HOPE Parent Handbook. Karolyn King-Peery & Lynn Wilder, $16.95

Positive behavior support for families of children with challenging behavior.

Fathering: Promoting Positive Father Involvement. Edited by Annie Devault, Gilles Forget & Diane Dubeau, $29.95

In the past few decades, researchers and practitioners have moved away from the idea of fatherhood as a single, monolithic concept. Examining the challenges of vulnerable fathers such as those in poverty or in prison, they have developed valuable new strategies for cultivating the positive involvement of fathers in the lives of their children.

Drawing on the innovative work of Prospère, a Quebec organization that brought together fathers, university researchers, and health and social service practitioners, Fathering details innovative approaches that support positive father involvement. It provides numerous examples of strategies and interventions with fathers, lessons learned from these practices on how to better support vulnerable fathers and families, and in-depth information on ways of designing, implementing, evaluating, and disseminating the results of participatory action research (PAR) — a methodology which put fathers at the heart of the project’s decision-making.

The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children. Alison Gopnik, $24.00

Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call "parenting" is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult. In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar 21st-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong — it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for kids and parents, too.

Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and to be very different both from their parents and from each other. The variability and flexibility of childhood lets them innovate, create, and survive in an unpredictable world. “Parenting" won't make children learn — but caring parents let children learn by creating a secure, loving environment.

How to Listen So Parents Will Talk & Talk So Parents Will Listen. John Sommers-Flanagan & Rita Sommers-Flanagan, $46.00

Embracing the uniqueness of every parent, family situation, and practitioner, HOW TO LISTEN SO PARENTS WILL TALK AND TALK SO PARENTS WILL LISTEN helps professionals address the parent-child problems that families often find puzzling or challenging and for which they seek support and guidance.

The book features many specific interventions and methods for helping parents implement developmentally appropriate and scientifically supported strategies for building healthy parent-child relationships and working through the most common conflicts encountered in families and will help you develop positive relationships with parents so that constructive two-way dialogue can be established. Even the most difficult and resistant parents can be successfully engaged through the helpful strategies, advice, and tools found in this practical guide.

The Incredible Years: a Trouble-Shooting Guide for Parents of Children Aged 2-8 Years. Carolyn Webster-Stratton, $31.95

All children misbehave for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's simply to test how far they can go or to get the attention they crave. Other children are temperamentally more difficult to parent than others because they are impulsive, or hyperactive, inattentive, or delayed in some aspect of their development. This invaluable handbook provides parents with guidelines not only to help prevent behavior problems from occurring but also with strategies to promote children's social, emotional, and academic competence.

Is This a Phase? Child Development & Parent Strategies, Birth to 6 Years. Helen Neville, $29.95

This reassuring and practical guide explains what to expect at every developmental stage between birth and age 6. Pediatric nurse and parent educator Helen Neville walks parents and caregivers through three dozen topics common in the first six years of life. Accurate, reliable and authoritative, Is This a Phase looks at child development and temperament and how they affect the family.

Little Volcanoes: Helping Young Children and Their Parents to Deal with Anger. Warwick Pudney & Éliane Whitehouse, $30.95

Young children can erupt like little volcanoes when they are feeling angry. It can be overwhelming and difficult to deal with, and can produce angry feelings in the parent or caregiver too.

This book is packed with advice and strategies for those working with children under five on how to understand and manage anger in children, and how to help their parents or caregivers to deal with anger. The authors outline the different reasons children may feel angry so that their emotions can be fully understood, and offer strategies to combat negative feelings and minimize outbursts. These include putting in place behavioural boundaries and helping a child to feel secure. Simple activities and exercises are also given to help children and adults to express their anger positively. In addition, a selection of poems and stories will help adults to pass on the lessons of the book to children.

Nurturing Attachments Training Resource: Running Parenting Groups for Adoptive Parents and Foster or Kinship Carers. Kim Golding, $158.95

NURTURING ATTACHMENTS TRAINING RESOURCE is a complete group programme containing everything you need to run training and support sessions for adoptive parents, as well as residential, foster, or kinship carers. Based on attachment theory, this rich resource provides an authoritative set of ideas for therapeutically parenting children along with all the guidance you will need to implement the training.

The training resource includes theoretical content and process notes for facilitators, and a range of activities supported by a CD-ROM with photocopiable reflective diary sheets, activity sheets and handouts. It is structured into 3 modules with 6 sessions per module. Module 1: Provides an understanding of attachment theory, patterns of attachment and an introduction to therapeutic parenting. Module 2: Introduces the House Model of Parenting, providing guidance on how to help the children experience the family as a secure base. Module 3: Continues exploring the House Model of Parenting, with consideration of how parents can both build a relationship with the children and manage their behaviour.

Once Upon a Group: a Guide to Running and Participating in Successful Groups.  Maggie Kindred & Michael Kindred, $17.95

Once Upon a Group is a short, light-hearted guide to groupwork suitable for experienced or novice childbirth educators, parenting education instructors, and parent support group leaders. The book provides an easily-digestible way of understanding group dynamics, the practicalities of running a group, and how to participate in one. It covers how and where to set up a group, including the type of room used, the size of the group and the arrangement of chairs, and the importance of boundaries and rules within a group. It also covers issues such as communication, sensitivity, listening, leadership, decision-making, labeling and stereotyping, diversity, and how to apply the ideas in the book to different settings.

Parenting After the Death of a Child: a Practitioner's Guide. Jennifer Buckle & Stephen Fleming, $63.95

The death of a child has a tremendous and overwhelming impact on parents and siblings, completely altering the psychological landscape of the family. In the aftermath of such a tragedy, parents face the challenge of not only dealing with their own grief, but also that of their surviving children. How can someone attempt to cease parenting a deceased child while maintaining this role with his/her other children? Is it possible for a mother or father to effectively deal with feelings of grief and loss while simultaneously helping their surviving children?

Parenting After the Death of a Child addresses this complex and daunting dilemma. Following on the heels of a qualitative research study that involved interviewing bereaved parents, both fathers and mothers, Buckle and Fleming have put together several different stories of loss and recovery to create an invaluable resource for clinicians, students, and grieving parents. The authors present the experience of losing a child and its subsequent impact on a family in a novel and effective way, demonstrating the strength and importance of their book for the counseling field.

The Parenting Skills Homework Planner. Arthur Jongsma & Sarah Edison Knapp, $64.99

The Parenting Skills Homework Planner provides you with an array of ready-to-use, between-session assignments designed to fit virtually every therapeutic mode. This easy-to-use sourcebook features:

• 60 ready-to-copy exercises designed to aid parents
• A quick-reference format — the interactive assignments are grouped by behavioral problem, from divorce and trauma to school pressures and sexual abuse
• Expert guidance on how and when to make the most efficient use of the exercises
• Assignments that are cross-referenced to The Parenting Skills Treatment Planner — so you can quickly identify the right exercise for a given situation or behavioral problem
• A CD-ROM that contains all the exercises in Word format — allowing you to customize them to suit you and your clients' unique styles and needs

The Parenting Skills Treatment Planner, with DSM-5 Updates. Sarah Edison Knapp & Arthur Jongsma Jr., $66.00

This timesaving resource features:

• Treatment plan components for 31 behaviorally based presenting problems
• Over 1,000 prewritten treatment goals, objectives, and interventions
• A critical tool for mental health professionals addressing today's complex family structures and the increased pressures on children and adolescents from school, peers, and the general culture
• Saves you hours of time-consuming paperwork, yet offers the freedom to develop customized treatment plans for parents and other caregivers
• Organized around 31 main presenting problems with a focus on giving parents the skills they need to effectively help their children navigate contemporary issues such as the trauma associated with divorce, school pressures, and sexual abuse
• Over 1,000 well-crafted, clear statements describe the behavioral manifestations of each relational problem, long-term goals, short-term objectives, and clinically tested treatment options
• Easy-to-use reference format helps locate treatment plan components by behavioral problem

Parenting and Theory of Mind. Scott Miller, $73.95

Parenting and Theory of Mind represents the conjunction of two major research literatures in child psychology. One is longstanding. The question of how best to rear children has been a central topic for psychology ever since psychology began to develop as a science. The other research literature is a good deal younger, though quickly expanding. Theory of mind (ToM) has to do with understanding of the mental world — what people (children in particular) know or think about mental phenomena such as beliefs, desires, and emotions.

Where do children's ToM abilities come from? In particular, how do children's experiences shape their development? If we know the formative experiences that underlie ToM, then we may be able to optimize this important aspect of development for all children. The last 15 or so years have seen a rapid expansion of the literature on the social contributors to ToM, including hundreds of studies directed to various aspects of parenting. These studies have made clear that parents can be important contributors to what their children understand about the mental world. This is the first book to comprehensively bring together the literature on ToM and parenting, summarizing what we know about how parenting contributes to one of the most important outcomes in cognitive development and outlining future directions for research in this growing area.

Parents with Intellectual Disabilities Past, Present and Futures. Edited by Gwynneth Llewellyn, et al, $59.95

The first international, cross-disciplinary book to explore and understand the lives of parents with intellectual disabilities, their children, and the systems and services they encounter. The book presents a unique, pan-disciplinary overview of this growing field of study and offers a human rights approach to disability and family life. Informed by the newly adopted UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), the book provides comprehensive research-based knowledge from leading figures in the field of intellectual disability.

Pathways to Competence for Young Children: a Parenting Program (Book and CD-ROM). Sarah Landy & Elizabeth Thompson, $79.95

With Pathways to Competence for Young Children: a Parenting Program, professionals can help parents understand and manage their child’s behavior and take an active role in guiding social-emotional development. Developed from Sarah Landy’s highly regarded child development book, Pathways to Competence, this manual-and-CD set shows how to set up, lead, and evaluate a parenting program for parents of children from birth to age 7.

Everything professionals need to conduct a Pathways to Competence Parenting Group is included: more than 140 parent handouts (easy to print from the CD-ROM inside this book), instructions on structuring and leading sessions, problem-solving tips, and evaluation guidelines. With this engaging and effective program, parents will discover how to strengthen their relationships with their children and foster the healthy social-emotional development children need to manage life’s challenges.

Also: Pathways to Competence: Encouraging Healthy Social and Emotional Development in Young Children, 2nd Edition. Sarah Landy, $65.95

Pathways to Positive Parenting: Helping Parents Nurture Healthy Development in the Earliest Months. Jolene Pearson, $55.50

An essential resource for all professionals who work with families of infants, this valuable handbook serves as a parent educator’s guide to coaching and supporting new parents.

The curriculum provides professionals with innovative teaching techniques, and practical and effective strategies that are field-tested, science-based and can be applied immediately in work supporting the development of positive parenting skills. The book also includes information on important topics such as postpartum depression, tummy time, breastfeeding, safe sleep, and coping with crying.

Picking Up the Pieces after Domestic Violence: a Practical Resource for Supporting Parenting Skills. Kate Iwi & Chris Newman, $38.95

This practical guide provides techniques and exercises to help practitioners work in a structured and focused way with parents in the aftermath of a violent relationship. It sets out a framework for assessing risks and needs, and covers how to build strengths, set goals, and plan an intervention pathway. Advice, exercises and handouts that are easily photocopied will help parents understand the impact of domestic violence and develop their relationship with their child. The resource also covers how to use discipline, talking to children, understanding child development, and how to build resilience and empathy. Guidance on working with both the perpetrator and the victim of domestic violence is included.

This invaluable resource will benefit child and family social workers, children's centre workers, therapists, counsellors and anyone supporting a family recovering from the trauma of domestic violence.

Reflective Parenting: a Guide to Understanding What's Going On In Your Child's Mind. Alistair Cooper & Sheila Redfern, $42.95

Have you ever wondered what’s going on in your child’s mind? This engaging book shows how reflective parenting can help you understand your children, manage their behaviour and build your relationship and connection with them. It is filled with practical advice showing how recent developments in mentalization, attachment and neuroscience have transformed our understanding of the parent-child relationship and can bring meaningful change to your own family relationships.

Alistair Cooper and Sheila Redfern show you how to make a positive impact on your relationship with your child, starting from the development of the baby’s first relationship with you as parents, to how you can be more reflective in relationships with toddlers, children and young people. Using everyday examples, the authors provide you with practical strategies to develop a more reflective style of parenting and how to use this approach in everyday interactions to help your child achieve their full potential in their development; cognitively, emotionally and behaviourally.

Reflective Parenting is an informative and enriching read for parents, written to help parents form a better relationship with their children. It is also an essential resource for clinicians working with children, young people and families to support them in managing the dynamics of the child-parent relationship. This is a book that every parent needs to read.

The Role of the Father in Child Development. Edited by Michael Lamb, $121.00

The definitive reference on the importance role fathers play in child development today.

Scientific Parenting: What Science Reveals about Parental Influence. Nicole Letourneau, $24.99

Combining the expertise of its author — a celebrated expert in parent-infant mental health and mother of two — with the latest findings in gene-by-environment interactions, epigenetics, behavioural science, and attachment theory, SCIENTIFIC PARENTING describes how children's genes determine their sensitivity to good or bad parenting, how environmental cues can switch critical genes on or off, and how addictive tendencies and mental health problems can become hardwired into the human brain. The book traces conditions as diverse as heart disease, obesity, and depression to their origins in early childhood. It brings readers to the frontier of developmental research, unlocking the fascinating scientific discoveries currently hidden away in academic tomes and scholarly journals. Above all, SCIENTIFIC PARENTING explains why parenting really matters and how parents' smallest actions can transform their children's lives.

Skills for Families, Skills for Life: How to Help Parents and Caregivers Meet the Challenges of Everyday Living. Amy Simpson, Paula Kohrt, Linda Shadoin, Joni Cook-Griffin & Jane Peterson, $23.95

This revised and expanded edition of Skills for Families, Skills for Life can help family practitioners and other professionals incorporate the teaching of life skills into the assessment of and treatment planning for the families they work with. More than one hundred thirty basic to complex skills in thirteen caregiving areas are outlined in step-by-step detail. Skills areas have expanded to include:

• Relationships
• Mental Health Needs
• Preventing Abuse
• Community Safety
• Housing
• Money Management
• Informal and Formal Supports
• Education

An enclosed CD-ROM allows you to print skill sheets to use as checklists, make notes, and list resources as you counsel individual families. A new chapter also helps you locate public and private, local and national sources of assistance for families.

Skills Training for Struggling Kids: Promoting Your Child’s Behavioral, Emotional, Academic, and Social Development. Michael Bloomquist, $26.50

Challenging kids don't behave badly on purpose — they are simply struggling to "catch up" in key areas of psychological and cognitive development. If your child or teen's emotional or behavioral difficulties are getting in the way of success at home, at school, or in social situations, this is the book for you. Dr. Michael Bloomquist has spent decades helping parents to understand acting-out kids and support their healthy development. In these pages, he presents tried-and-true ways you can build your 5 - to 17-year-old's skills to:

• Follow rules and behave honestly.
• Curb angry outbursts.
• Make and maintain friendships.
• Express feelings productively.
• Stay on task at school.
• Resolve conflicts with siblings.
• Manage stress.

Loads of checklists, worksheets, and troubleshooting tips help you select and implement the strategies that meet your child's specific needs. You'll also build your own skills for parenting effectively when the going gets tough. Systematic, compassionate, and practical, the book is grounded in state-of-the-art research. The road to positive changes for your child and family starts here.

Also available:

Practitioner Guide to Skills Training for Struggling Kids, by Michael Bloomquist, $39.50

Addressing frequently encountered emotional, behavioral, and academic difficulties, this essential guide shows how to help parents implement proven skills-building strategies with their kids (ages 5–17). The author draws on over 25 years of research and clinical practice to provide a flexible program for individual families or parent groups. The focus is on teaching kids the skills they need to get their development back on track and teaching parents to cope with and manage challenging behavior. Featuring vignettes and troubleshooting tips, the Practitioner Guide is packed with ideas for engaging clients and tailoring the interventions. In a large-size format for easy photocopying, it contains more than 60 reproducible handouts and forms.

STAR Parenting Tales and Tools: Respect and Guidance Strategies to Increase Parenting Effectiveness & Enjoyment. Elizabeth Crary, $26.95

STAR Parenting offers you the tools and the process you need to be the best parent you can be for your child.

Weaving the Cradle: Facilitating Groups to Promote Attunement and Bonding Between Parents, Their Babies and Toddlers. Edited by Monika Celebi, $39.95 (pregnancy to age two)

Groups for parents, babies and toddlers, spanning the 1001 critical days from late pregnancy up to age two, are an effective way of supporting expectant and new parents by helping them to become more attuned, sensitive and empathic towards their child.

Contributors bring together a range of theoretical perspectives to show different ways to facilitate groups that combine mindfulness and psychological insight to promote bonding, attunement and mind-mindedness, and to prevent abuse and neglect. Case examples show a range of techniques that can be used, including baby massage, movement therapy, Video Interaction Guidance, Watch Wait Wonder and psychotherapeutic interventions. Examples include an in-patient mother-baby unit, community and health centres in the UK, to international examples in Greece, Kenya and New Zealand. Chapters illustrate practical and clinical aspects of running groups, the associated challenges, and highlights the importance of professional collaboration in a benign environment.

Weaving the Cradle is full of ideas and insights for those already running groups, as well as for those considering it, across health, social care and education settings.

Working with Parents of Young People: Research, Policy and Practice. Debi Roker & John Coleman, $41.95

Drawing on the findings from years of applied research projects carried out by the Trust for the Study of Adolescence, each chapter focuses on a particular area of parenting young people — from monitoring and supervision to support for foster families — and each highlights the implications of research results for policy and practice. This book presents a range of approaches to working with parents and families, and discusses the effectiveness of techniques such as parent mentoring and involving young people in parenting programmes.

Working with Parents of Young People provides a strong set of evidence-based guidelines for best practice and will be a key resource for all those working to support the parents of teenagers.

Your Guide to Nurturing Parent-Child Relationships: Positive Parenting Activities for Home Visitors. Nadia Hall, Chaya Kulkarni & Shauna Seneca, $69.50

Looking for an engaging way to nurture parent and child relationships? This highly practical, activity-based guide shows home visitors what to do and how to do it — and is virtually a training program in itself! Developed out of three different training curricula that have been extensively field-tested and used in workshops across the United States and Canada, this guide gives home visitors creative and proven tools to help parents strengthen their relationships with their children.

Because every child and family is different, the approaches outlined are flexible, adaptable, culturally sensitive, and appropriate for all families. Parents can be overwhelmed by personal challenges and stressors that compromise their capacity to do the best for their children. Let this be the home visitor's guide to harnessing parents' inherent strengths, building their parenting competencies, and empowering them with useful strategies.