7 Parenting Books I've Enjoyed Lately

If you're looking for something to read, consider this list.

I am deep in research mode for my next book, which means I’ve put myself on an aggressive reading program. I aim to read for an hour each morning, starting at 5 or 5:30. This is before my kids get up, so the house is blissfully silent. I make a cup of tea and turn off my phone. I make a point of not looking at it before I start because I don’t want to think about the outside world.

Then I sit down with whatever book is next and read it actively, meaning I have a sharp pencil in hand and make liberal use of sticky flags. I write notes in the margins (unless it’s a library book) and, on the back page, scribble bullet-point ideas and any reactions that pop into my mind. All of these notes and underlined sections eventually get transferred to index cards and catalogued in my office for future reference. It’s a lot of work, but it means that I’m reading for a clear purpose, and none of the information I glean from the books gets wasted.

It is amazing how much headway you can make by being diligent and focused with reading, even if it’s just for an hour a day. I’ve read the books pictured above in the past 2 months, plus a number of others, including fiction (shoutout to the latest Kate Atkinson novel in her Jackson Brodie series—swoon!). But I wanted to highlight the above titles because they’re most likely to be interesting to Analog Family readers.

Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear by Kim Brooks (2018)

You may have heard of Kim Brooks. She left her 4-year-old son alone in a car for a few minutes to run into a suburban Target—and ended up getting reported to police by a stranger who filmed the whole thing. This kicked off a multi-year legal battle, as well as this work of writing that delves into the parental fears that dominate American culture nowadays. Her writing is full of thoughtful insights, rich with research and interviews, driven by the overarching narrative of her nightmarish fight with an unjust system. One line that has stuck with me:

“It seemed to me, as I sat there, that perhaps this was the greatest cost of fear, the way it blots out everything it touches—drowning out the joys of parenthood, deadening the very thing we hoped it would protect.”

Paranoid Parenting: Abandon Your Anxieties and Be a Good Parent by Frank Furedi (2001)

A book I have seen referenced in numerous places, it proved difficult to find; I had to buy a used copy off Amazon. Written more than 20 years ago, Furedi is eerily prescient about a shift in Western parenting culture away from a belief in children’s inherent capability toward a sense that they are fragile, incapable, and constantly in danger.

He writes about the risks of prioritizing a child’s emotional state above all else, about outsourcing decisions about your child to “experts” who do not know your child, about the risks of adults living vicariously through their children, and how often adults project their own insecurities onto their kids in ways that are deeply unfair:

“Just remember that when you are about to say, ‘I could not live with myself if something happened to my child,’ you are principally concerned with your own state of mind rather than the welfare of your child.”

Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn (2022)

Initially I confused this book with my own at Indigo, thanks to a similar color scheme. It also sounded interesting—and proved to be. Linn talks about the effects of digital media on kids from the perspective of commercialism and marketing. It’s not something I’d considered much before, but she argues that exposure to online games, advertising, edtech, and social media turns kids into consumers of products that are generating enormous profits for companies and squelching creative drive at the same time.

She also takes a strong stance against educational technology in the classroom. Google gets a $30 management fee for every Chromebook, but Linn says that’s only a partial benefit: “The biggest boon to Google is the likely potential of lifetime brand loyalty from millions of students using the company’s operating system and products for years before they graduate.”

This book inspired one of my most popular posts: Let Them Have Silence

Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be by Timothy P. Carney (2024)

I enjoyed this book a lot. Carney is a father of six kids, so he’s staunchly pro-big family, but his arguments are relevant for families of all sizes. He’s a proponent of descheduling kids’ lives, being less fearful of the world (he talks to Lenore Skenazy of Let Grow, who wrote the foreword to my book), letting kids roam freely, and designing urban spaces to ensure kids can move safely in public.

He addresses uncomfortable topics like why parents are so profoundly lonely and miserable while caring for young children (lack of community), the harms caused by influencer-mom culture and social media in general, and how a society without children is ultimately a sad one to inhabit. But mostly, his book felt like a love letter to parenthood, which is a refreshing and much-needed perspective.

“I never noticed airplanes overhead or silly decorations in windows until I took walks with my children. I never paid attention to the dozen different shapes of leaves on our block until my three-year-old began asking why the leaves on our sidewalk all looked different from one another. My kids made our street more alive. Kids fertilize our world. Childhood is expansive, and not just for the children.”

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff (2021)

When she felt she could not handle her own three-year-old anymore, Doucleff did a daring thing. She packed a suitcase and took off, toddler in tow, to rural Yucatan, the Canadian Arctic, and East Africa to see what she could learn from other cultures’ approaches to raising children. Her book collates this advice.

While some of it differs from my own approach to parenting (e.g., I think young children are far more capable of emotional regulation than we give them credit for), I loved her lessons on getting kids to pitch in with chores. I’ve been applying her tips, getting my kids to cook more than ever. I enjoyed her discussion about storytelling and how magical tales are a powerful motivator for kids:

“Not that long ago, the [storytelling] tool formed a huge part of Western parenting… Fairies filled the woods, ghosts roamed the roads, and monsters lurked in lakes and bogs. Some of the creatures were helpful; some were dangerous. And a big function of these mythical creatures was to help keep children safe.”

Reset Your Child’s Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time by Victoria Dunckley (2015)

An astonishing book that was ahead of its time, I keep wondering where/what Dr. Dunckley is doing now. So much has changed since this book was published 9 years ago. I’ve tried to contact her, unsuccessfully.

Her basic argument is that going screen-free is the best possible thing you can do for a child and adolescent, and that screens are getting in the way of optimal development and performance. She does not think that any child should be diagnosed with any learning disability or neurodivergence unless they have undergone a minimum 4-week electronics fast to reset their mental baseline.

She believes that some children using devices are succumbing to Electronic Screen Syndrome: “One way to think about the syndrome is to view electronics as a stimulant (in essence, not unlike caffeine, amphetamines, or cocaine): electronic screen device use puts the body into a state of high arousal and hyperfocus, followed by a ‘crash.’” Her book offers a comprehensive plan for “detoxing” kids of all ages from excessive screen use.

Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber by Joe Clement and Matt Miles

I wrote a dedicated review in a post here.

If you have any recommendations, please let me know. Right now, I’m most interested in parent psychology, why and how we need to change how we parent in order to deal with the issue of excessive screen time, why it’s so hard to say no to our kids, why we fear social ostracism, and how we assess risk and justify certain parental behaviours.

You Might Also Like:

• I Don’t Play With My Kids

• On Reading More Books

• Books I Enjoyed This Year

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