Birth order has a powerful effect on children's emotional development, on their self-esteem, and on their sense of well-being. The youngest child, the firstborn, the middleborn, twins, and the only child all have specific birth order issues that, if not atted to early on, can impair their functioning and their interpersonal relations at home and at school, and can follow them into adulthood. Parental birth order, too, plays an important role, as do such other factors as gender and family size. To understand these birth order blues, the author, an expert in parent-child relationships, first raises parents' awareness of the impact of birth order upon children. She then shows how to identify their children's birth order problems, often disguised by behaviors such as underachievement or aggression, and suggests how they can resolve these issues and prevent negative behavioral patterns from developing.

Cartoons provide a humorous view of the frustrations and rewards of parenthood as first-time parents Wanda and Darryl adjust to life with their infant daughter Zoe.

The latest collection of "Baby Blues" strips shows the harried parents Darryl and Wanda adding a third little one to the MacPherson household. Illustrations.

Key insights into birth order help readers understand themselves and improve their marriage, parenting, and career skills.

Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. "In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." —Jack Kerouac

Janie was four years old when she nearly drowned due to her mothers neglect. Through an unhappy foster home experience, and years of feeling that she is unwanted, she keeps alive her dream of someday being a famous singer.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give My Poor Heart Ease puts front and center a searing selection of the artistically and emotionally rich voices from this invaluable documentary record. Illustrated with Ferris's photographs of the musicians and their communities and including a CD of original music, the book features more than twenty interviews relating frank, dramatic, and engaging narratives about black life and blues music in the heart of the American South. Here are the stories of artists who have long memories and speak eloquently about their lives, blues musicians who represent a wide range of musical traditions--from one-strand instruments, bottle-blowing, and banjo to spirituals, hymns, and prison work chants. Celebrities such as B. B. King and Willie Dixon, along with performers known best in their neighborhoods, express the full range of human and artistic experience--joyful and gritty, raw and painful. In an autobiographical introduction, Ferris reflects on how he fell in love with the vibrant musical culture that was all around him but was considered off limits to a white Mississippian during a troubled era. This magnificent volume illuminates blues music, the broader African American experience, and indeed the history and culture of America itself.

The author of the classic In a Different Voice offers a brilliant, provocative book about love that has powerful implications for the way we live and love today. “Compelling ... A thrilling new paradigm.” —The Times Literary Supplement Carol Gilligan, whose In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now asks: Why is love so often associated with tragedy? Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns? Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare’s plays and Freud’s case histories, to Anne Frank’s diaries and contemporary novels.

Myriam Szejer talks to newborns. For over a decade she has worked in the maternity ward of a hospital outside Paris. Called in by hospital staff when a baby or its parents are suffering, Szejer uses the psychoanalytic techniques of careful listening and talking to reach failure-to-thrive and other suffering newborns and reverse their conditions. Talking to Babies is the story of her important work. Having psychologists or psychiatrists available to new mothers on maternity wards is not unusual. But having a psychoanalyst available who also talks to newborns is completely revolutionary. Szejer has pioneered her unique approach to treating struggling infants through years of study and apprenticeship. And in Talking to Babies she describes in thoughtful and convincing detail the theory of her practice and how her interventions work, illustrating with the moving stories of the numerous infants she has helped. In the very first days of a baby's life, the newborn, still struggling between birth and its entry into our world, already needs words. By "needing words," Szejer means that infants need to be talked to about the specific situations into which they are born. They need to hear about their mothers, fathers, siblings, and caretakers, but they also need to hear about problematic aspects of their histories, such as the death of a twin sibling or the death of a baby before them. These words must be spoken to the baby in the presence of his or her mother and father if at all possible. Such speech helps everyone-newborn and parents-to find their places in the altered world created by the birth. When such words are not present, physical symptoms and illness may emerge. Talking to Babies is the first book to show how the "talking cure" can help infants and their parents. Post-partum depression in mothers, failure-to-thrive in babies-these problems might be approached quite differently if maternity wards incorporated some of Szejer's practices. High-tech interventions are all too common in American maternity wards; Talking to Babies offers a more humane route for restoring health. Preface: "Sometimes, as I am leaving the hospital late at night, I stop to look in on a patient who has recently given birth. And often, as I open the door, I catch a special moment: the new mother leaning over the crib, or more often face to face with the newborn on her lap, looking intently at him and murmuring motherly words . . . In a maternity ward, however, everything is not always so rosy. Birth is sometimes accompanied by suffering, a suffering too rarely perceived in our Western societies . . . When I met Myriam Szejer, an unknown field opened to me: the reality of the newborn's preverbal behavior. Szejer dares psychoanalyze newborns, dares talk to them, dares intervene before the symptom has taken root, particularly in dangerous situations . . . Her approach ought to become known to all who make perinatal medicine their career. Her approach is innovative. What woman has not been shaken to her very being by becoming a mother; what man has not trembled at becoming a father? Babies feel that profound apprehensiveness. They need to be listened to, which is a form of respect." --from the Preface by René Frydman, M.D.

44 SCOTLAND STREET - Book 7 The residents and neighbors of 44 Scotland Street and the city of Edinburgh come to vivid life in these gently satirical, wonderfully perceptive serial novels, featuring six-year-old Bertie, a remarkably precocious boy—just ask his mother. If you haven’t met the residents of 44 Scotland Street yet, there is no better time, since everyone seems to be in the midst of new beginnings. New parents Matthew and Elspeth must muddle through the difficulties of raising their triplets Rognvald, Tobermory and Fegus—there's normal sleep deprivation, and then there's trying to tell the children apart from one another. Angus and Domenica are newly engaged, and now they must negotiate the complex merger of two households. Domenica is also forced to deal with the return of an old flame, while Big Lou has begun the search for a new one, boldly exploring the new world of online dating and coming up with an Elvis impersonator on the first try. And in Bertie’s family, there's a shift in power as his father Stuart starts to stand up to overbearing mother, Irene—and then there’s Bertie, who has been thinking that he might want to start over with a new family and so puts himself up for adoption on eBay. With his signature charm and gentle wit Alexander McCall Smith vividly portrays the lives of Edinburgh’s most unique and beloved characters.