Every Parent’s Summer Reading List

Here are five books, along with their Amazon descriptions, that I recommend for parents. Choose one or more and enjoy!

Your Kid's Gonna Be Okay: Building the Executive Function Skills Your Child Needs in the Age of Attention 
by Michael Delman 
 
Do you do too much for your kid out of fear they will never make it in the world without your oversight? Are you frustrated or worried about your 'tween, teen, or young adult who seems lazy or unmotivated? Do you see your child unable to reach their potential because they are disorganized, scattered, and can't manage their time?

In Your Kid's Gonna Be Okay: Building the Executive Function Skills Your Child Needs in the Age of Attention, Michael Delman tackles the big worries that keep parents awake at night. In a conversational tone informed by deeply-rooted expertise, Delman illustrates how to connect meaningfully with your child and encourage habits that lead to success in school — and in life.

Your Kid's Gonna Be Okay helps parents understand the critical skills needed for effective self-management and provides specific strategies and tools to help kids become motivated, accountable, and independent. Through engaging stories that illustrate how we all build Executive Function skills, Delman demonstrates how kids can change their habits as they pave their own path toward competence today and confidence in their future. Parents of kids with ADHD or other learning differences – or parents worried about how their child can manage distractions will benefit from Delman's experience as an educator, an Executive Function coach, and as a parent.

At What Cost?: Defending Adolescent Development in Fiercely Competitive Schools
by David L. Gleason Psy.D. 

Anxiety, depression, and their dangerous manifestations-substance abuse, eating disorders, self-injury and suicide- are increasing student conditions at many competitive high schools. Paradoxically, most of these schools promote themselves as being committed to students' holistic development in academics, athletics and the arts, and in their personal, social, and emotional growth.

So why are so many students struggling? Dr. Gleason has investigated these concerns in competitive high schools throughout the United States and around the world and has found almost complete unanimity in how educators and parents have responded to his interviews. In sum, these caring and dedicated adults fully admit to overscheduling, overworking and, at times, overwhelming their students and teenaged children. This conflict – adults wanting to educate and parent adolescents in healthy and balanced ways, but simultaneously, overscheduling, overworking and, at times, overwhelming them – is at the heart of this book.
 
iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us 
by Jean M. Twenge PhD

With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and later, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps why they are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. iGen is also growing up more slowly than previous generations: eighteen-year-olds look and act like fifteen-year-olds used to.

As this new group of young people grows into adulthood, we all need to understand them: Friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.
 
How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success 
by Julie Lythcott-Haims 

A provocative manifesto that exposes the harms of helicopter parenting and sets forth an alternate philosophy for raising preteens and teens to self-sufficient young adulthood
In How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims draws on research, on conversations with admissions officers, educators, and employers, and on her own insights as a mother and as a student dean to highlight the ways in which overparenting harms children, their stressed-out parents, and society at large. While empathizing with the parental hopes and, especially, fears that lead to overhelping, Lythcott-Haims offers practical alternative strategies that underline the importance of allowing children to make their own mistakes and develop the resilience, resourcefulness, and inner determination necessary for success.

Relevant to parents of toddlers as well as of twentysomethings–and of special value to parents of teens–this book is a rallying cry for those who wish to ensure that the next generation can take charge of their own lives with competence and confidence. 
 
Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania 
by Frank Bruni 

Over the last few decades, Americans have turned college admissions into a terrifying and occasionally devastating process, preceded by test prep, tutors, all sorts of stratagems, all kinds of rankings, and a conviction among too many young people that their futures will be determined, and their worth established by which schools say yes and which say no.

That belief is wrong. It's cruel. In WHERE YOU GO IS NOT WHO YOU'LL BE, Frank Bruni explains why, giving students and their parents a new perspective on this brutal, deeply flawed competition and a path out of the anxiety that it provokes.

Bruni, a bestselling author and a columnist for the New York Times, shows that the Ivy League has no monopoly on corner offices, governors' mansions, or the most prestigious academic and scientific grants. Through statistics, surveys, and the stories of hugely successful people who didn't attend the most exclusive schools, he demonstrates that many kinds of colleges-large public universities, tiny hideaways in the hinterlands-serve as ideal springboards. And he illuminates how to make the most of them. What matters in the end are a student's efforts in and out of the classroom, not the gleam of his or her diploma.

Where you go isn't who you'll be. Americans need to hear that-and this indispensable manifesto says it with eloquence and respect for the real promise of higher education.

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