Top Five Books

Top 5 Book Recommendations

Very Intentional Parenting

Isn't it time for a parenting book that is practical and relatable? Destini Ann Davis is a working mom and parenting coach who read dozens of parenting books and made all the typical parenting mistakes before realizing that in order to have a peaceful, positive relationship with her children, she first needed to have a peaceful, positive relationship with herself. Very Intentional Parenting features a fresh, down-to-earth approach to parenting from someone you can relate to. Through real-life examples from her experiences as a mom and parenting coach, she gives readers actionable strategies for tackling many of today’s most challenging parenting scenarios using positive discipline techniques, effective communication, and emotional intelligence. She'll encourage you, coach you, and help you become the parent you’ve always desired to be. If you're a parent looking for more connection and collaboration in your relationship with your child, you've come to the right place.

Here's what you'll find inside:

• A fresh, energetic take on parenting in today's world

• Practical tips for creating open and constructive dialogue with your kids

• Parent-focused insights to empower you to heal, so you can then avoid fear- and trauma-based parenting strategies

• Actionable steps to increase respect in your home, while still preserving the parent-child relationship

Peaceful Discipline

Using best practices from gentle parenting, improv comedy, and trauma recovery, this peaceful parenting book brings JOY back to families. These positive discipline tips can help whether you're raising toddlers, parenting preschoolers, or supporting school-age children with love and respect. Effective for the hypersensitive child and the strong-willed child, this book offers conscious parenting guidance for solving challenges and preventing them in the first place.

Offering a balance of science, practical experience, and new perspectives, Peaceful Discipline guides parents to a lifetime of easier, deeper, and stronger relationships with their kids. - Tina Payne Bryson, PhD, New York Times best-selling author of The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline

Accessible, tender and wise, this book provides parents with actionable tips and strategies that will forge more connected and joyful relationships! - Mona Delahooke, PhD, best-selling author of Beyond Behaviors and Brain-Body Parenting

It Didn't Start With You

Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.

As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.

The Whole Brain Child

In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson offer a revolutionary approach to child rearing with twelve key strategies that foster healthy brain development, leading to calmer, happier children. The authors explain—and make accessible—the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. The “upstairs brain,” which makes decisions and balances emotions, is under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain. No wonder kids throw tantrums, fight, or sulk in silence. By applying these discoveries to everyday parenting, you can turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child’s brain and foster vital growth.

Complete with age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.

Non-Violent Communication

What is Violent Communication?

If “violent” means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate—judging others, bullying, having racial bias, blaming, finger pointing, discriminating, speaking without listening, criticizing others or ourselves, name-calling, reacting when angry, using political rhetoric, being defensive or judging who’s “good/bad” or what’s “right/wrong” with people—could indeed be called “violent communication.”

What is Nonviolent Communication?

Nonviolent Communication is the integration of four things:

• Consciousness: a set of principles that support living a life of compassion, collaboration, courage, and authenticity

• Language: understanding how words contribute to connection or distance

• Communication: knowing how to ask for what we want, how to hear others even in disagreement, and how to move toward solutions that work for all

• Means of influence: sharing “power with others” rather than using “power over others”

Nonviolent Communication serves our desire to do three things:

• Increase our ability to live with choice, meaning, and connection

• Connect empathically with self and others to have more satisfying relationships