San Antonio College Library

A leading social critic goes inside the billion-dollar baby business to expose the marketing and the myths, helping parents determine what's worth their money and what's a waste. Pamela Paul investigates the marketing hype, peer pressure, and easy consumerism that spins parents into purchasing overpriced products and raising overprotected, overstimulated, and over-provided-for children. Paul shows how the parenting industry has persuaded parents that...

Over a seven-year period, Dr. Jay Belsky, a professor of human development at Penn State University, conducted a major study of 250 couples entering the transition to parenthood - the period that runs from the third trimester of pregnancy to the child's third birthday. His conclusion: The birth of a child is one of the greatest challenges to a couple's marriage - financially, emotionally, physically, and sexually. For many new parents, the impact...

In this video, follow Sarah Mason, a deaf woman, as she prepares to give birth. The Lessings provide guidance and coping strategies.

Outlines an engaged approach to child-rearing that is based on strategies for fostering child creativity and confidence, describing the author's experiences with such methods as bribing, conditioning psychology, and placebo medications. All parenting is about experimenting (whether you know it or not). It begins on the day our kids start to teethe, as we do backflips to distract them from the pain, and continues all the way through their teenage...

Joanna is in a touring girl's choir and Mark is a struggling architect when they first meet on the road in Europe. The film follows their life together - through courtship and marriage, infidelity and parenthood - all on the road.

How children think is one of the most enduring mysteries-and difficulties-encountered by parents. In an effort to raise our children smarter, happier, stronger, and better, parents will try almost anything. But how can we tell marketing from real science? And what really goes through your kid's growing mind-as an infant, in school, and during adolescence? Neuroscientists Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang (who is also a parent) explain the facets and functions...

Does everyone and, more important, should everyone have the right to give birth to and raise children? Should there be a national parenting policy that includes mandatory parenthood training and screening to determine the suitability of all prospective parents, not just adoptive or foster parents? Should contraception ever be made compulsory to prevent some people from procreating? Is there a meaningful difference between being a mother or father...

What's the first thing a woman does when she thinks she might be pregnant? She Googles. And it goes downhill from there. While the internet is full of calming and cheerily supportive articles, it's also littered with hyper-judgmental message boards and heaps of contradictory and scolding information. Motherhood Smotherhood takes parents through the trenches of new parenting, warning readers of the pleasures and perils of mommy blogs, new parent groups,...

"With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise, the demise of the nuclear family, and the increase in marriages and adoptions among same-sex partners, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux. In the Metamorphoses of Kinship, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualizes these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organization...

"Emily Kane shows clearly that most parents understand children's personality to be some combination of nature and nurture, and many wish they could help nurture their children to escape gender traps. Yet these parents are themselves trapped by the gender structure itself, especially the accountability they feel to other people's expectations, and the fear that if their boys are free to explore activities usually associated with girls they will be...