This guide offers a step-by-step plan that helps parents cultivate daily routines so that they can turn life with toddlers into a mutually rich time of curiosity and learning.

This is an audio summary of The Whole-Brain Child, a book that offers strategies for handling the everyday challenges of parenting, including children’s struggles with themselves and conflicts with others, so as to not only survive the difficult moments but use them to guide the development of your child’s brain toward personal insight, empathy, and integration. 

Do you wish there was a way to raise well-behaved children without punishment? Are you afraid the only alternative is being overly indulgent? With Positive Discipline, an encouragement model based on both kindness and firmness, you don't have to choose between these two extremes. Using these 49 Positive Discipline tools honed and perfected after years of real-world research and feedback, you'll be able to work with your children instead of against them.

One of the very best scientific predictors for how any child turns out - in terms of happiness, academic success, leadership skills, and meaningful relationships - is whether at least one adult in their life has consistently shown up for them. In an age of scheduling demands and digital distractions, showing up for your child might sound like a tall order. But as best-selling authors Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson reassuringly explain, it doesn’t take a lot of time, energy, or money. Instead, showing up means offering a quality of presence.

In Brain Rules for Baby, Dr. John Medina shares what the latest science says about how to raise smart and happy children from zero to five. This book is destined to revolutionize parenting. Just one of the surprises: The best way to get your children into the college of their choice? Teach them impulse control. Brain Rules for Baby bridges the gap between what scientists know and what parents practice.

For 25 years, Positive Discipline has been the gold standard reference for grown-ups working with children. Now Jane Nelsen, distinguished psychologist, educator, and mother of seven, has written a revised and expanded edition. The key to positive discipline is not punishment, she tells us, but mutual respect. Nelsen coaches parents and teachers to be both firm and kind, so that any child - from a three-year-old toddler to a rebellious teenager - can learn creative cooperation and self-discipline with no loss of dignity.

It’s time to change the way we see babies. Drawing on principles developed by the educator Dr Maria Montessori, The Montessori Baby shows how to raise your baby from birth to age one with love, respect, insight, and a surprising sense of calm. Cowritten by Simone Davies, author of the bestselling The Montessori Toddler, and Junnifa Uzodike, it’s a book filled with hundreds of practical ideas for understanding what is actually happening with your baby, and how you can mindfully assist in their learning and development.

This enduring classic of educational thought offers teachers and parents deep, original insight into the nature of early learning. John Holt was the first to make clear that, for small children, "learning is as natural as breathing." In this delightful yet profound book, he looks at how we learn to talk, to read, to count, and to reason, and how we can nurture and encourage these natural abilities in our children.

In The Gardener and the Carpenter, 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.

Parents, regardless of the period, will experience some difficulties talking to and making their kids listen to them. Parents from the past went through such trouble, parents in the present times are having a hard time talking to their kids, and future parents will likely experience the same difficulties.