Recommended Best Parenting Books on Connection and Bonding with Children

I highly recommend the following books to assist you in creating connection with your child. I have included links with each book so you can purchase them at a discounted low price at Amazon.com. I chose what I believe are the "best of the best" in parenting books. When you are ready to purchase a book, please come back and purchase it by using these links since in doing so you will also be helping to support the education freely provided on Healthy Child.

Thank you,

Jane Sheppard, editor and publisher of Healthy Child

This is my favorite and I wrote the forward to this book :-)

Connection Parenting: Parenting Through Connection Instead of Coercion, Through Love Instead of Fear

Author: Pam Leo

"Connection Parenting" is based on author Pam Leo's seven week parenting series, "Meeting the Needs of Children," that she has been teaching for over sixteen years. The premise is that a strong parent-child bond is the key to children's optimal human development and our most effective parenting tool. Connection Parenting is a proactive approach to parenting that supports parents and caregivers in creating and maintaining the strong bonds children need to thrive. Pam Leo puts words to why children act out, melt down, or are whiny or clingy at times.

Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves: Transforming Parent-child Relationships from Reaction And Struggle to Freedom, Power And Joy

Author: Naomi Aldort

Every parent would happily give up ever scolding, punishing or threatening if she only knew how to ensure that her toddler/child/teen would thrive and act responsibly without such painful measures. Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves is the answer to this universal wish. It is not about gentle ways to control a child, but about a way of being and of understanding a child so she/he can be the best of herself, not because she fears you, but because she wants to, of her own free will.

Parenting From Your Heart: Sharing the Gifts of Compassion, Connection, and Choice (Nonviolent Communication Guides)

Author: Inbal Kashtan

Parenting that Promotes Peace-Parents everywhere want to connect compassionately with their children, to show them love and offer guidance even in difficult moments. In this packed and practical booklet, Inbal Kashtan describes how the practicing the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) process can transform parenting to promote peace for generations to come.

Whether you're parenting a teenager or an infant, the parenting help and guidance you'll find in this booklet will transform your challenges and conflicts into opportunities to parent from your heart. Find NVC-based parenting tips and ten practical exercises to foster trust and improve cooperation even in the most trying circumstances. Learn how to make connection your top priority, share power in your family and inspire open dialogue that promotes mutual understanding.

DVD: What Babies Want

with: Noah Wyle;Joseph Chilton Pearce:Sobonfu Some';David Chamberlain Director: Debby Takikawa

What Babies Want is an award winning documentary film that explores the profoundly important and sacred opportunity we have in bringing children into the world. Research is now showing us that our society is a product of how we welcome and raise our children. When babies are welcomed with love and warmth and given the immediate opportunity to bond with parents, they develop minds that are coherent and flexible, ready in turn to make compassionate and meaningful connections with others as they grow.

Infant Massage--Revised Edition: A Handbook for Loving Parents

by Vimala Schneider Mcclure

This is a wonderful book with information about bonding through gentle touch and helping your baby to relax. You can easily learn the gentle movement and techniques for massaging your baby (includes a lot of great pictures).

The Aware Baby

Author: Aletha Jauch Solter

Aletha Solter discusses the attachment needs of infants, which are best met by close physical contact, breast-feeding, and prompt responsiveness to crying. At the core of her philosophy is the concept of crying as tension release, with the emphasis that babies should always be held when they cry.

Raising Drug-free Kids: 100 Tips for Parents

Author: Aletha Solter

The root cause of substance abuse is not a lack of discipline, but a lack of connection. This is different from most other drug prevention books because it begins at conception, it describes a non-punitive approach to discipline, and while focusing on illegal drugs, it also includes tips for avoiding psychiatric drug use during childhood. Organized by age group, from preschool through young adulthood, the handy 100 tips will show parents how to help their children to:
Feel good about themselves without an artificial high.
Cope with stress so they won't turn to drugs to relax.
Respect their bodies so they will reject harmful substances.
Have close family connections so they won't feel desperate to belong to a group.
Take healthy risks (like outdoor adventures) so they won't need to take dangerous ones.

The Attachment Parenting Book : A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby

Authors: William Sears, MD and Martha Sears, RN

Is it OK to sleep with your newborn baby? How old is too old for breastfeeding? These questions and more are answered in this latest addition to the Sears Parenting Library. Attachment Parenting encourages early, strong, and sustained attention to the new baby's needs and this book outlines the steps that will create the most lasting bonds between parents and their children. Practical and inspirational, this book, the heart of the Sears parenting creed, is a necessity for every new parents' bookshelf. William Sears, M.D., and Martha Sears, R.N., are widely regarded as North America's foremost baby and childcare experts and have had success with their previous 16 books addressing parenting issues.

Three in a Bed : The Benefits of Sharing Your Bed With Your Baby

Author: Deborah Jackson

Until relatively recently, babies weren't sent off to sleep alone in their cribs where they often cry themselves to sleep--only to wake, needing to be fed or comforted until they can fall asleep again. This book offers an alternative: taking your baby to bed with you. Drawing on up-to-date and startling new evidence, the author shows how babies who sleep with their parents benefit by getting virtually a full night's sleep. Three in a Bed also includes a fully revised chapter based on new research on the SIDS debate and includes practical information on safety in the bed, how to sustain your sex life, and how to deal with the moment when the baby leaves his parents' bed. The approached advocated in this book can change the life of any parent struggling with getting their baby to sleep through the night.

UNCONDITIONAL PARENTING: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

Author: Alfie Kohn

Most parenting guides begin with the question "How can we get kids to do what they're told?" -- and then proceed to offer various techniques for controlling them. In this truly groundbreaking book, nationally respected educator Alfie Kohn begins instead by asking "What do kids need - and how can we meet those needs?" What follows from that question are ideas for working with children rather than doing things to them.

One basic need all children have, Kohn argues, is to be loved unconditionally, to know that they will be accepted even if they screw up or fall short. Yet conventional approaches to parenting such as punishments (including "time-outs"), rewards (including positive reinforcement), and other forms of control teach children that they are loved only when they please us or impress us. Kohn cites a body of powerful, and largely unknown, research detailing the damage caused by leading children to believe they must earn our approval. That's precisely the message children derive from common discipline techniques, even though it's not the message most parents intend to send.

Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting

Authors: Myla Kabat-zinn and Jon Kabat-Zin

In the rush, rush, rush of too-much-to-do-and-no-time-to-do-it, the all-important, nurturing aspects of parenthood can easily disappear. Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are, and Myla Kabat-Zinn have collaborated on Everyday Blessings, a book that approaches parenting from the Zen Buddhist position of moment-to-moment awareness. It's a beautiful presentation and a thoughtful approach to mindful meditation that will help you slow down, enrich your life as a parent, and nourish the internal life of your children.

Baby Matters: What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Caring for Your Baby

By Linda F. Palmer, DC

Solid, convincing research that you are not going to find elsewhere -- supporting healthy and attachment parenting ideas. Baby Matters is a groundbreaking new book that only a mother with both rigorous scientific training and an extensive alternative health practice could have assembled. Dr. Linda Palmer uncovers the hidden consequences of parenting choices, both physiological and psychological, and filters out what is not valid or substantiated.