As charming performers who skillfully reflect their parents expectations, far too many children grow into adults driven to greater and greater achievements by an underlying sense of worthlessness. Never allowed to express their true feelings, and having lost touch with their true selves, they act out their repressed feelings with episodes of depression and compulsive behavior. They in turn inflict the same legacy of repression on their own children. This poignant and thought-provoking book shows how narcissistic parents form and deform the lives of their children. "The Drama of the Gifted Child" is the first step toward helping readers reclaim their lives by discovering their own needs and their own truth."A book that patients prescribe...the therapists are reading it because their patients are recommending it." "--Washington Post Book World" "Full of wisdom and perception."--Anthony Storr, "New Republic" "Rare and compelling in its compassion and its unassuming eloquence...her examples are so vivid and so ordinary that they touch the hurt child in us all." "--New York Magazine"

Returning to the themes of her classic Drama of the Gifted Child, the famed psychoanalyst examines the consequences of cruelty to children and offers ways we can heal our early psychic wounds

Outlines a step-by-step plan for parents designed to raise childhood obesity awareness and establish life-long healthy eating patterns, in a guide that covers such topics as allergies, eating disorders, and exercise.

The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should--and should not--have over their children. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships produce the "familial relationship goods" that people need to flourish. Children's healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child's interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children's values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children. Family Values reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children.

David Elkind’s new book is designed to help parents avoid the miseducation of young children that is on the increase today. Across the country—in schools and in homes—educational programs intended for school-age children are being misappropriated for the instruction of preschoolers. Books, lectures, and the media propagate the idea that only a “superkid” can grow up to compete successfully in the adult world—thereby encouraging parents to teach infants and young children academic and athletic skills. Yet, there is considerable evidence that early instruction can do lasting harm—that young children subjected to this kind of pressure are, in fact, at psychological and physical risk. Dr. Elkind shows us the very real difference between the mind of a preschool child (how it works) and that of a school-age child. He makes clear how much young children can and do learn when they are presented with developmentally appropriate parenting practices and education. He shows us how healthy education supports and encourages the spontaneous learning process through which young children explore and understand their immediate world, and how miseducation ignores it, attempting to teach the wrong things at the wrong time. And, in turn, we see how early miseducation can cause permanent damage to a child’s self-esteem, the loss of the positive attitude a child needs for learning the blocking of natural gifts and potential talents. Finally, Dr. Elkind discusses what parents should look for when deciding upon the initial stages of their children’s education and what preschool programs are the most considerate of the individual child. In a special section, he answers the most common questions he’s heard from parents.