Offers a resource for Hispanic parents who try to maintain respect for cultural traditions while readying their children for success in the world, discussing history, customs, and responsibilities

Gloria G. Rodriguez, Ph.D., is the founder, president, and CEO of Avance, a nonprofit family support and education program that provides services and training to Hispanic parents across the country and in Latin America. Both Avance, which has won numerous awards, and Rodriguez have been featured in "The New York Times, Parents" magazine, and "Latina." Gloria Rodriguez lives in San Antonio, Texas, where Avance is based.

Our Children is the first book published in English -- or Spanish -- to address the specific needs of Latino parents. A complete, hands-on guide for caregivers of children from birth through preadolescence, it provides practical information and helpful advice on: -- History, Traditions, and Culture: Our Children helps Hispanic parents explore their rich history, and colorful traditions, and unique culture, and shows them how to use Latino culture and values to enrich their children's growth and development as well as enhance their pride and self-esteem.-- Cognitive Concerns and Social Customs and Skills: Our Children covers topics from using traditional Hispanic games and songs in teaching basic skills to preparing bilingual and monolingual children for school.-- Marriage, Family, and Community: Particularly for working parents who must negotiate new roles and responsibilities, here are words of wisdom on how to strengthen and maintain these foundations. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs—private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid. Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Nicole P. Marwell discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but Bargaining for Brooklyn widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.

The stunning success of Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher’s landmark book, showed a true and pressing need to address the emotional lives of girls. Now, finally, here is the book that answers our equally timely and critical need to understand our boys. In Raising Cain, Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., and Michael Thompson, Ph.D., two of the country’s leading child psychologists, share what they have learned in more than thirty-five years of combined experience working with boys and their families. They reveal a nation of boys who are hurting—sad, afraid, angry, and silent. Statistics point to an alarming number of young boys at high risk for suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, violence and loneliness. Kindlon and Thompson set out to answer this basic, crucial question: What do boys need that they’re not getting? They illuminate the forces that threaten our boys, teaching them to believe that “cool” equals macho strength and stoicism. Cutting through outdated theories of “mother blame,” “boy biology,” and "testosterone,” Kindlon and Thompson shed light on the destructive emotional training our boys receive—the emotional miseducation of boys. Through moving case studies and cutting-edge research, Raising Cain paints a portrait of boys systematically steered away from their emotional lives by adults and the peer “culture of cruelty”—boys who receive little encouragement to develop qualities such as compassion, sensitivity, and warmth. The good news is that this doesn't have to happen. There is much we can do to prevent it. Kindlon and Thompson make a compelling case that emotional literacy is the most valuable gift we can offer our sons, urging parents to recognize the price boys pay when we hold them to an impossible standard of manhood. They identify the social and emotional challenges that boys encounter in school and show how parents can help boys cultivate emotional awareness and empathy—giving them the vital connections and support they need to navigate the social pressures of youth. Powerfully written and deeply felt, Raising Cain will forever change the way we see our sons and will transform the way we help them to become happy and fulfilled young men.