Central Skagit Library District

As a parent you strive to model kindness, compassion, and patience when interacting with your children. But no parent is perfect, and in difficult or stressful moments, you may react to your kids in ways that don't exactly fit your ideal model of parenting for example, yelling. You aren't alone. Parental reactions are often deeply ingrained, and you likely learned them from your parents. So how can you break this cycle and be the kind of parent you...

Award-winning science journalists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman demonstrate that many of modern society's strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring--because key twists in the science of child development have been overlooked. The authors discuss the inverse power of praise, why insufficient sleep adversely affects kids' capacity to learn, why white parents don't talk about race, why kids lie, why evaluation methods for "giftedness"...

The current model of parental discipline is as outdated as a rotary phone. Why don't our kids do what we want them to do? Parents often take the blame for misbehavior, but this obscures a broader trend: in our modern, highly connected age, children have less self-control than ever. About half of the current generation of children will develop a mood or behavioral disorder or a substance addiction by age eighteen. Contemporary kids need to learn independence...

"The runaway New York Times bestseller that shows American parents the secrets behind France's amazingly well-behaved children. When American journalist Pamela Druckerman had a baby in Paris, she didn't aspire to become a "French parent." But she noticed that French children slept through the night by two or three months old. They ate braised leeks. They played by themselves while their parents sipped coffee. And yet French kids were still boisterous,...

North Dakota, 1951. It's been years since George and Margaret Blackledge lost their son James and months since his widow Lorna took off with their only grandson and married Donnie Weboy. Margaret is resolved to find and retrieve the boy -- while George is none too eager to stir up trouble. Soon, the Blackledges find themselves entangled with the entire Weboy clan, who are determined not to give up the boy without a fight.

Clint Smith's vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are...

"Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street is a shocking and immersive read perfect for fans of Gone Girl and The Haunting of Hill House. "The new face of literary dark fiction." -Sarah Pinborough, New York Times bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes "The buzz...is real. I've read it and was blown away. It's a true nerve-shredder that keeps its mind-blowing secrets to the very end." -Stephen King In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street...

Examines how reading aloud makes adults and children smarter, happier, healthier, more successful, and more closely attached, even as technology pulls in the other direction. "A miraculous alchemy occurs when one person reads to another, transforming the simple stuff of a book, a voice, and a bit of time into complex and powerful fuel for the heart, brain, and imagination. Grounded in the latest neuroscience and behavioral research, and drawing widely...

A little book with a big heart—from the New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and Anxious People.
"I read this beautifully imagined and moving novella in one sitting, utterly wowed, wanting to share it with everyone I know." —Lisa Genova, bestselling author of Still Alice

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell...

Four-year-old Marissa Fordham, brutally slashed and mutilated, witnessed the murder of her mother. To protect their fragile witness, the police call in Anne Leone, child advocate. But when one loose thread begins to unravel the shroud of lies behind the case, a truth more terrible than anyone could have imagined is revealed--a truth that will put Anne and Haley directly in the sights of a killer.