Grandparenting

His summer vacation is ruined when 12-year-old Buzz Collins shares his room and emotional space with his grandfather, who has Alzheimer's disease, and his parents forbid him to associate with his best friend, Mitch. The thought of giving up his friendship is bad enough. But how can he relate to someone who forgets his grandson's name, wears adult diapers, and thinks dog biscuits are people cookies-someone who could die in the night and scare Buzz right out of puberty. Buzz thinks Alzheimer's is caused by a traumatic event, such as the train accident that killed Grandpa's brother Barkley in childhood. The situation turns deadly when Buzz and Mitch-whose friendship Buzz refuses to end-attempt to cure Grandpa of Alzheimer's disease by recreating the train accident on a hot summer day. (Ages 12-14/YA)

Defies the myth that parents must sacrific themselves. Instead, shows them how to reclaim their power, balance, happiness...and lives. When kids turn to substance abuse, parents also become vicims as they watch their children transform into irrational and antisocial individuals. This harrowing scenario finds parents buckling beneath the stress--often with catastrophoric consequences: Divorce, career upsets, breakdowns and worse. "Don't Let Your Kids Kill You" is a landmark work that dares focus on the plight of the confused, distressed parent and not the erring child. It sets aside any preconceived ideas that parents are to blame for what is essentially a full-blown global crisis. Drawing on interviews with parents who've survived the heartbreak of kids on drugs, combined with his own experience, Charles Rubin provides practical advice on how parents can help themselves and their families by first attending to their own needs. Liberation begins when you open this book.

How To Raise Emotionally Healthy Children is a wake-up call to America that we are abandoning our children emotionally. Failure to support our children's emotional health at home and in schools is jeopardizing their future and that of our nation. The book has a compelling and provocative message about parent-child relations. It provides powerful and practical concepts and tools that enable parents, teachers, and childcare providers to interact with children and with each other in emotionally healthy ways. In the process, children learn to interact with each other in the same way. How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children, shows parents and teachers how to nourish emotional health at home and at school. Failure to meet these emotional needs of our children is one of the most serious and under-recognized problems facing our country. The book enables parents to recognize and satisfy the five critical emotional needs that all children have: to feel respected, important, accepted, included, and secure, and in the process, parents will have their own needs satisfied too. Babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, parents and grandparents all have these same emotional needs. Meeting these needs in childhood provides the foundation for success in school, work, relationships, marriage and life in general.

Twenty years and 1.6 million copies later, this beautiful keepsake book is still a beloved family treasure. This charming album offers an appealing and accessible means for grandmothers to record family history, important events, and favorite anecdotes for their grandchildren. The lovingly illustrated four-color pages include places to write down favorite recipes, unforgettable family celebrations and traditions, and other memories that every grandmother loves to pass down. Inspirational poems and intriguing questions invite grandmothers to share fascinating facts about their lives, including stories about childhood, marriage, their own children, and their perceptions of life today. Although this is a grandmothers' book, there are pages for grandfathers to record their thoughts, too. A wonderful family heirloom, Grandmother Remembers is as lovely and relevant today as it was when it was first published twenty years ago.

Whether you’re a parent, teacher, grandparent, counselor, or school volunteer, you will find practical, down-to-earth ideas for creating remarkable relationships with the children in your life. You will think about your conversations in a new light, creating deeper, more meaningful connections with your kids so you can ­support them in becoming confident, resilient, and effective young people.

From the chapter "What You Say Matters": “Your words and conversations create your reality, your future, and your relationships.... Your words have the power to hurt as well as to nurture. The pattern of your conversations creates an environment that can be healthy or detrimental. The primary conversations that surround your children are your conver­sations—both with them directly and with others while your children are present. And those are the conversations you have the power to change.”

The book empowers parents to be more conscious of what they say and how they speak to their kids and provides simple, straightforward ideas that parents, teachers, grandparents and others can put into practice and see immediate results. As father to two wonderful adults and grandfather to thirteen in his blended family, Axtell knows it’s never too late to work on creating great relationships with the kids in your life.