"What do Angela Merkel, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, JK Rowling and Beyoncé have in common?" was the headline in the English newspaper The Observer in 2014. "Other than riding high in Forbes list of the world’s most powerful women," journalist Tracy McVeigh wrote in answer to her own question, "they are also all firstborn children in their families. Firstborn children really do excel." So what does it mean to be an eldest daughter? Firstborns Lisette Schuitemaker and Wies Enthoven set out to discover the big five qualities that characterize all eldest daughters to some degree. Eldest daughters are responsible, dutiful, thoughtful, expeditious and caring. Firstborns are more intelligent than their siblings, more proficient verbally and more motivated to perform. Yet at the same time they seriously doubt that they are good enough. Being an eldest daughter can have certain advantages, but the overbearing sense of responsibility often gets in the way. Parents may worry about their ‘difficult’ eldest girl who wants to be perfect in everything she does whilst her siblings may not always understand her. "The Eldest Daughter Effect" shows how firstborn girls become who they are and offers insights that can give them more freedom to move. And parents will gain a better understanding of their firstborn children and can support them more fully on their way.

Daughter of the Forest is a testimony to an incredible author's talent, a first novel and the beginning of a trilogy like no other: a mixture of history and fantasy, myth and magic, legend and love. Lord Colum of Sevenwaters is blessed with six sons: Liam, a natural leader; Diarmid, with his passion for adventure; twins Cormack and Conor, each with a different calling; rebellious Finbar, grown old before his time by his gift of the Sight; and the young, compassionate Padriac. But it is Sorcha, the seventh child and only daughter, who alone is destined to defend her family and protect her land from the Britons and the clan known as Northwoods. For her father has been bewitched, and her brothers bound by a spell that only Sorcha can lift. To reclaim the lives of her brothers, Sorcha leaves the only safe place she has ever known, and embarks on a journey filled with pain, loss, and terror. When she is kidnapped by enemy forces and taken to a foreign land, it seems that there will be no way for her to break the spell that condemns all that she loves. But magic knows no boundaries, and Sorcha will have to choose between the life she has always known and a love that comes only once. Juliet Marillier is a rare talent, a writer who can imbue her characters and her story with such warmth, such heart, that no reader can come away from her work untouched. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The impact of the first-born daughter's childhood position on her adult life, siblings and spouse shared by more than 100 family members of diverse ethnicities. Results from an online survey of several hundred random participants. The author's own experiences. A contributing psychologist's suggestions for personal transformation.

Oprah Winfrey is not only a well-known media personality but a woman who has based her career on helping others. This book examines Winfrey’s background and the foundational moments that made her into the media mogul she is today. Students learn about her influential work for women and girls in South Africa, as well as her inspiring journey from poverty to financial and professional success.

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

Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of Galileo's daughter, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has written a biography unlike any other of the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics- indeed of modern science altogether." Galileo's Daughter also presents a stunning portrait of a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me." Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. In that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, one man sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. With all the human drama and scientific adventure that distinguished Dava Sobel's previous book Longitude, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story

An exploration of the self-fulfilling lives of people who, by chance or choice, have no children of their own • Investigates the life choices people make around having children and alternate ways of finding purpose in life • Based on a global survey and more than 50 in-depth interviews with childless and childfree women and men aged 19 to 91 from different cultures and walks of life • Enables readers to place their own circumstances in a larger context as they gain insight in the worldwide trend of people who lead a self-fulfilling, childless life Not having children is on the rise in many countries across the globe. August 1st has been named International Childfree Day, with a Childfree Woman and Man of the Year Award. Yet being childless is a subject not much talked about--the focus tends to be on having families and raising children, in rural, town, or city life. Let’s talk about not having children, about what people like us do with our time, about how we spend our money, and--most of all--how we find purpose and fulfilment in our lives. Never attracted to family life herself, Lisette Schuitemaker began openly discussing why people didn’t have children and how that was for them, resulting in intimate conversations with childless women and men and surprising insights. Inspired to delve further, she interviewed non-parenting people aged 19 to 91 across the globe. She found that no story was like the other and that many had been waiting to be listened to with sensitivity. She heard stories across the spectrum, from exhilarating to painful, from people still on the fence to the childfree who have always known starting a family was not for them. Complementing her interview findings with a worldwide survey and recent research, the author paints a rich picture of the individual lives of childless and childfree women and men. This book is for everyone who has not gone the way of parenthood, who has close family or friends who lead self-directed lives without offspring, and for all those who are still contemplating this essential life choice. The stories in this book also testify that not having children of your own in no way means the joys (and trials) of children pass you by altogether. This book shows that it is ok to celebrate not only the parenting way of life and the children who come to those who love them, but also those who are brave enough to follow the lesser known path of non-parenting.

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

There are many factors affecting a child’s personality and the adult they become, but the least understood is birth order. Why is it that children in a family can share the same gene pool, a similar socio-economic environment and experience similar parenting styles yet have fundamentally different personalities, interests and even different careers as adults? Birth order! The implications for parents, teachers and adults involved with children are many. First published in 2003 to great acclaim, this fully revised and updated edition seeks to increase the reader’s understanding of birth order theory, including the impact of a child’s broader social environment and the rise of the standard two-child family, where the second-born is simultaneously the last-born. It will enable you to delve a little deeper and look for the constellation of positions within a family, giving you a clearer picture of your own quirks and ambitions, along with those of your siblings, children, partner, workmates, friends and colleagues. Addressing multiple births, children with a disability, genetic engineering, blended families, gender balance, only children and birth-order balance in the workplace, parenting expert and father of three Michael Grose challenges parents to raise each child differently according to his or her birth order.

Reading this book, you get the sense that Lisette Schuitemaker sees right through you. As if she knows that you gorge on chocolate at times, that you go crazy if people know something you don’t, that you are bound to hit the slow cashier one day. Or that in truth you’re not here at all with your thoughts. And how ardently you hope that one day someone will truly love you the way you are. You, me, all of us have drawn some conclusions in our childhood: impressions we got as a young child and the conclusions we jumped to about ourselves, the world and our place in it. These childhood conclusions still produce habitual thoughts that mark our behaviors. “Why didn’t I know this before and why don’t we all know this?’ were the questions that prompted the author to share her insights. Illustrated with examples from her private practice she shows how childhood conclusions are at work in all of us--and how we can turn them around into a positive outlook on ourselves and others. The five childhood conclusions tell you exactly what you think about yourself. And how you could think differently. And gain so much more freedom for living your life. This book is for anyone who is curious where their habitual thoughts arise from.