"In this timely and necessary book, New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose dismantles two hundred years of unrealistic parenting expectations and empowers today's mothers to make choices that actually serve themselves, their children, and their communities"--

In this witty novel--originally published as Whatever Makes You Happy --that inspired Netflix's major motion picture Otherhood , three mothers try to save their grown sons from themselves. Gillian, Helen, and Carol are three suburban mothers who have known each other since their respective sons were babies, and have met in a regular coffee group for years. These days, their sons are a bunch of thirty-four-year-old slackers: they have no wives and no children, never call, and seem unlikely to outgrow their post-adolescent lifestyles anytime soon. After yet another fruitless Mother's Day, Carol has an outlandish but irresistible idea: each woman will go drop in on her son for an unexpected weeklong visit and find out what's really keeping him from responsible adult life. Together, and with mixed success, the mothers set out to whip their sons into shape. Laugh-out-loud funny and remarkably insightful about family life, Otherhood will appeal to parents who yearn for a closer relationship with their adult children, and for the younger generation who seem to want the opposite, but will never quite relinquish the hope that their parents will swoop in and make everything better.

IF YOU THOUGHT TINSELTOWN WAS TOUGH . . . Tori Spelling might have grown up with everything a girl could wish for, but these days she’s just another suburban working mom . . . whose toddler regularly recognizes her in the pages of US Weekly . Welcome to Mommywood , where the stars are two feet tall and your neighbors know who you are before you move in. Like most parents, Tori wants her children to have the one thing she didn’t have as a kid—a normal family. On their hit Oxygen reality show, Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood , the starlet and her husband Dean McDermott regularly wrestle dirty diapers, host the neighborhood block party, and tackle temper tantrums on the red carpet. But when the cameras aren’t rolling, Tori’s still having awkward run-ins with a former 90210 costar at a laser tag birthday party, scooping rogue poo out of the kiddie pool on a resort vacation, and racing to win back her pre-baby body before the media starts calling her fat. For all her suburban fantasies, Tori Spelling is no June Cleaver. With the same down-to-earth wit that made her entertaining memoir sTORI telling a #1 New York Times bestseller, Tori tells the hilarious and humbling stories of life as a mom in the limelight, from learning to be the kind of parent her own mother never was to revealing what it’s like to raise a family while everyone is watching. Mommywood is an irresistible snapshot of celebrity parenthood that you won’t get from the paparazzi.

"There's a little Jewish mother in every mother," as comedienne Judy Gold reveals in her achingly hilarious and poignant book For a Jewish girl who remembers the first book ever read to her as a child was the pop-up version of The Diary of Anne Frank, learning how to be a Jewish mother who wasnt a carbon copy of HER Jewish mother wasnt easy. Here, Emmy Awardwinning comedienne Judy Gold asks, "Are there any Jewish mothers out there like me, or are they all, G-d forbid, like my mother" In 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, she incorporates her own adventures in Jewish motherdom and her memories of growing up Jewish in suburban New Jersey -- communicating with her mother by putting Ann Landers articles on the fridge ("Dear Ann, My mother wont let me walk alone to school and Im 16! Please help." "Dear Ann, The crossing guard drinks. Please help.") -- with the voices of the fifty other Jewish mothers, she and her co-author, Kathleen Moira Ryan, interviewed. They asked homemakers, lawyers, Holocaust survivors twenty-five questions, including: --Who's your favorite Jewish mother (Judy's is Barbra Streisand.)? --How many times a day do you talk to your children or mother (for Judy, it's anywhere from one to the high double digits)? --Are Jewish mothers really more paranoid (or, "Why do I have to write an entire itinerary with names, addresses, and phone numbers every time I leave the house")? And so on. The culmination of these extraordinary stories confirms that there is ultimately something strong, courageous, and loving in every Jewish mother -- a hopeful -- and very funny -- message to mothers and their children everywhere.

In You Never Call, You Never Write, Joyce Antler provides an illuminating and often amusing history of one of the best-known figures in popular culture--the Jewish Mother. Whether drawn as self-sacrificing or manipulative, in countless films, novels, radio and television programs, stand-up comedy, and psychological and historical studies, she appears as a colossal figure, intensely involved in the lives of her children. Antler traces the odyssey of this compelling personality through decades of American culture. She reminds us of a time when Jewish mothers were admired for their tenacity and nurturance, as in the early twentieth-century image of the "Yiddishe Mama," a sentimental figure popularized by entertainers such as George Jessel, Al Jolson, and Sophie Tucker, and especially by Gertrude Berg, whose amazingly successful "Molly Goldberg" ruled American radio and television for over 25 years. Antler explains the transformation of this Jewish Mother into a "brassy-voiced, smothering, and shrewish" scourge (in Irving Howe's words), detailing many variations on this negative theme, from Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Woody Allen's Oedipus Wrecks to television shows such as "The Nanny," "Seinfeld," and "Will and Grace." But she also uncovers a new counter-narrative, leading feminist scholars and stand-up comediennes to see the Jewish Mother in positive terms. Continually revised and reinvented, the Jewish Mother becomes in Antler's expert hands a unique lens with which to examine vital concerns of American Jews and the culture at large. A joy to read, You Never Call, You Never Write will delight anyone who has ever known or been nurtured by a "Jewish Mother," and it will be a special source of insight for modern parents. As Antler suggests, in many ways "we are all Jewish Mothers" today.

Maybe you know Amanda. Maybe you are Amanda. Whoever you are, you will love Amanda. An important, shrewd, and laugh-out-loud funny debut novel that answers the question: What happens when Bridget Jones or the Sex and the City girls get married and have babies? Nothing ever prepared Amanda for this: not her elite college degree, not her brainy friends, not her mother the feminist heroine. At age 35, she finds herself at home with two children, mopping spills and singing The Itsy-Bitsy Spider. It doesn?t help that her husband?s face is all over national television or that her best friend is dating a billionaire or that every woman she knows seems to have a plastic surgeon and an interior decorator. While everyone else is racing up the fast track, it?s getting hard for Amanda to remember why she left work in the first place. Set amidst the glamor and power of boom-time Washington, D.C., Amanda Bright is a novel about status and ambition marriage and jealousy and a woman?s struggle to discover the things that matter most. Amanda Bright@Home will become an anthem for a generation of women that is learning that success is not always found at the office."

Selling "genetically gifted" human eggs on the free market for a hefty price. In vitro fertilization. Fetal rights. Prenatal diagnosis. Surrogacy. All are instances of biomedical and social "advancements" with which we have become familiar in recent years. Yet these issues are often regarded as distinct or only loosely related under the rubric of reproduction. Barbara Katz Rothman demonstrates how they form a complex whole that demands of us in response a woman-centered, class-sensitive way of understanding motherhood. We need a social policy for dealing with mothers and motherhood that is consistent with feminist politics and feminist theory. Her book show how we as a society must first recognize that the real needs of mother, father, and children have been swept aside in an attempt to reduce the complex process of human reproduction to a clinical event that can be controlled by medical technology. Rothman suggests ways to accomplish social and legal change that would allow technological advances to affirm motherhood and the mother-child relationship without cost to women's identity. This new edition of Recreating Motherhood contains exciting updates. Rothman shows how this material is key in understanding the family, not just motherhood. And a new chapter, "Reflections on a Decade," explores how new reproductive technologies combine with new marketing and new genetics to pose troubling social questions.

A comic and heartwarming memoir about childhood's second act from Real Simple journalist Catherine Newman. Much is written about a child's infancy and toddler years, which is good since children will never remember it themselves. It is ages 4-14 that make up the second act, as Catherine Newman puts it in this delightfully candid, outlandishly funny new memoir about the years that "your children will remember as childhood." Following Newman's son and daughter as they blossom from preschoolers into teenagers, CATASTROPHIC HAPPINESS is about the bittersweet joy of raising children--and the ever-evolving landscape of issues parents traverse. In a laugh out-loud, heart-wrenching, relatable voice, Newman narrates events as momentous as grief and as quietly moving as the moonlit face of a sleeping child. From tantrums and friendship to fear and even sex, Newman's fresh take will appeal to any parent riding this same roller coaster of laughter and heartbreak.

Whether you're a savvy mom of teens or a new mom trying to get baby to sleep, this book is for you. A must read for every mom who ever said: "Stop rocking on the chair!" Not your average poetry book, Ode to Chores is a clever and entertaining view of parenting, motherhood, children, pets, and the life and times of moms on call 24/7. ------------------ The Inspiration For This Book The whole thing started because I was lonely. I spent hours every day with my little kids, which I really loved for a while, but my husband was gone A LOT, and when he came home, he was all talked out. He just wanted to spend a little time with his two boys roughhousing and eating Oreo Thins. Plans with friends were few and far between because we were all busy shuffling kids to school and activities when we weren't working jobs, or doing house projects, or stumping for our chosen elected officials, or reconnecting with our significant others. In the meantime, exhausted at the end of every day, I still wanted to be an artist, a writer, and a musician. I'd been on stage for 25 years and suddenly the only singing I was doing was lullabies at 3 AM in a rocking chair trying to get my little muffin to sleep. . . just for a little while. . . sleep muffin, sleep. Somewhere along the way, I put down my pen and found myself deep in the stuff of kids. Then, one evening after an especially frustrating dinner with the boys, I sent everyone off to their rooms, flipped over an envelope lying in the mess on the dining room table, and wrote the poem Stop Rocking on the Chair. I was surprised at how satisfying it was to say it on the page. From there I started writing these "mom poems" all the time. As I did, I felt less and less alone. I was not only writing about my experience but a thread of experience that connected to moms all over the world and through time. The common language of motherhood reconnected me to my creativity and other people at the same time. I first thought I wrote this book for myself, but it turns out I wrote this book for you. I hope it brings you joy and even makes you cry. I hope it brings mothers together and inspires you to make some art and put it out into the world, so we can all have a moment of connection together. Call me. We'll have coffee. ------------------ About the Author Brenda Kahn is a poet, memoirist and an international recording artist who has shared the stage with Bob Dylan, David Byrne, and Jeff Buckley. She has expertise in changing both guitar strings and diapers. She is a writer of songs, poetry, memoir, and excuse notes for sick kids. She can paint and spackle like nobody's business and will also perform a cover of Bessie Smith's Ain't Nobody's Business if you request it at a live show. She lives in South Salem, NY with her husband and two boys, her golden retriever (Barley Patches), her two cats (Fluffy and Colby) and Ekko the crested gecko. Learn more about Bren at www.brendakahn.com Stay connected and support her work at www.BrendaKahn.com/Patreon

The Moral Instruction of Children is a classic parenting handbook/parenting skills guide by Felix Adler. Moral education is everywhere acknowledged to be the most important part of all education; but there has not been the same agreement in regard to the best means of securing it in the school. This has been due in part to a want of insight into the twofold nature of this sort of education; for instruction in morals includes two things: the formation of right ideas and the formation of right habits.