Beautiful Boy: a Father’s Journey through His Son’s Addiction. David Sheff, $21.50

At its heart Beautiful Boy is an amazingly honest and exquisitely written account of a family’s torturous journey through addiction. It raises questions that reflect the fears of every parent: Where does one’s responsibility to a loved one end? How — and when — should a parent know whether his or her child is substance abusing? And how does a family recover from the wounds afflicted by addiction and get on with their lives? David Sheff has written a powerful and moving family portrait that will resonate soundly with all readers and is sure to become a classic.

Beyond the Mommy Years: How to Live Happily Ever After...After the Kids Leave Home. Carin Rubenstein, $33.99

Beyond the Mommy Years offers fascinating research, helpful advice, and amusing anecdotes to the millions facing this uncertain but potentially enriching stage of life.

Boomerang Kids. Carl Pickhardt, $20.99

A revealing look at why so many of our children are failing on their own, and how parents can help.

But Nobody Told Me I'd Ever Have to Leave Home: from Toddlers to Teens — How Parents Can Raise Children to Become Capable Adults. Kathy Lynn, $19.95

Letting go is an often difficult aspect of parenting. But Nobody Told Me I'd Ever Have to Leave Home examines a parent's influence over a child's playtime, temperament, friendships, and disappointments, and offers suggestions on when to let children make their own decisions. Covering all stages in a child's life — from toddlers to teenagers and on to the post-secondary years — Lynn offers practical advice to parents that will help their children develop into capable adults.

Emerging Adulthood: the Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, 2nd Edition. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, $39.50

Merging stories from the lives of emerging adults themselves with decades of research, Emerging Adulthood covers a wide range of topics, including love and sex, relationships with parents, experiences at college and work, and views of what it means to be an adult. Author Jeffrey Jensen Arnett also refutes many of the negative stereotypes about emerging adults today, finding that they are not "lazy" but remarkably hard-working in most cases, and not "selfish" but rather concerned with making a contribution to improving the world. As the nature of American youth and the meaning of adulthood further evolve, Emerging Adulthood has become essential reading for understanding the face of modern America.

Researchers, students, therapists, educators, and policymakers who study or work with people ages 18-29, as well as parents and emerging adults themselves will find Emerging Adulthood a valuable resource as they navigate this dramatic shift in our understanding of maturity and adulthood.

The Empty Nest: 31 Parents Tell the Truth about Relationships, Love and Freedom After the Kids Fly the Coop. Karen Stabiner, editor, $17.95

Reassuring, warm, compassionate, funny and poignant, The Empty Nest is written by parents who have made the adjustment to an empty house. It’s the perfect book for any parent who is wondering what comes next.

Emptying the Nest: Launching Your Young Adult Toward Success and Self-Reliance. Brad Sachs, $21.99

In today’s rapidly changing world and challenging economy, young adults increasingly find themselves at a crossroads between financial and emotional dependence and autonomy. Drawing on Dr. Sachs' extensive clinical experience and his illuminating discussion of the latest psychological research, EMPTYING THE NEST will support parents in their efforts to cultivate their young adult’s success and self-reliance while simultaneously maintaining healthy family relationships. Parents will:

• Understand the family dynamics that either impede or nurture self-sufficiency
• Foster a higher degree of academic, professional, and fiscal responsibility
• Effectively encourage young adults to establish realistic goals and create a meaningful vision for their future
• Learn how to gradually let go, so that young adults discover how to resolve their own problems.

Getting to 30: a Parent's Guide to the 20-Something Years. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, $22.95

The book that addresses the new reality for parents of kids in their 20s and the issues that everyone in the media is talking about: When will this new generation of 20-somethings leave home, find love, start a career, settle down — grow up? And it's the book that will soothe your nerves. It’s loaded with information about what to expect and guidance on what to do when problems arise (as they probably will). In other words, this is the book parents need. Getting to 30 shows readers:

• Why the road to adulthood is longer than we think — and, for parents, bumpier
• The phenomenon of the boomerang child — and why it’s actually a good thing, for parents and their children
• The new landscape of 20-something romance

And it gives all the tools parents need to deal with the challenges, from six ways to listen more than you talk, to knowing when to open (and close) the Bank of Mom and Dad while saving for retirement, to figuring out the protocol for social media. Getting to 30 includes the latest research on the optimistic and supportive attitude most parents have regarding their 20-something children.

How Not to Move Back in With Your Parents: the Young Person's Guide to Financial Empowerment.  Rob Carrick, $22.95

Rob Carrick of The Globe and Mail is one of Canada's most trusted and widely read financial experts. His latest book targets financial advice specifically at young adults graduating from university or college and moving into the workforce, into the housing market and into family life. Financial beginners, in other words.  

Carrick offers what can only be described as a wealth of information, on the full life cycle of financial challenges and opportunities young people face, including saving for a post-secondary education and paying off student debts, establishing a credit rating, basic banking and budgeting, car and home buying, marriage and raising children of their own, and insurance.  

The book is mindful throughout that parents have a big role to play in all this. It addresses young readers throughout but regularly asks them to see things from their parents' perspective. In that way, Rob Carrick is able to offer advice to both generations. He even recognizes that in these difficult times, moving back in with the folks is sometimes a short-term necessity. This is a book that every parent needs to buy for each of their kids, plus one for themselves.

How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success. Julie Lythcott-Haims, $22.99

A provocative manifesto that exposes the harms of helicopter parenting and sets forth an alternate philosophy for raising preteens and teens to self-sufficient young adulthood. 

In How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims draws on research, on conversations with admissions officers, educators, and employers, and on her own insights as a mother and as a student dean to highlight the ways in which overparenting harms children, their stressed-out parents, and society at large. While empathizing with the parental hopes and, especially, fears that lead to overhelping, Lythcott-Haims offers practical alternative strategies that underline the importance of allowing children to make their own mistakes and develop the resilience, resourcefulness, and inner determination necessary for success. Relevant to parents of toddlers as well as of twenty-somethings, and of special value to parents of teens, this book is a rallying cry for those who wish to ensure that the next generation can take charge of their own lives with competence and confidence.

The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up. Barbara Hofer & Abigail Sullivan Moore, $18.99

In our speed-dial culture, parents and kids are now more than ever in constant contact. Communicating an average of thirteen times a week, parents and their college-age kids are having a hard time letting go.

Until recently, students handled college on their own, learning life's lessons and growing up in the process. Now, many students turn to their parents for instant answers to everyday questions. And Mom and Dad are not just the Google and Wikipedia for overcoming daily pitfalls; Hofer and Moore have discovered that some parents get involved in unprecedented ways, phoning professors and classmates, choosing their child's courses, and even crossing the lines set by university honor codes with the academic help they provide. Hofer and Moore offer practical advice, from the years before college through the years after graduation, on how parents can stay connected to their kids while giving them the space they need to become independent adults.

Letting Go: a Parents' Guide to Understanding the College Years, 6th Edition. Karen Levin Coburn & Madge Lawrence Treeger, $21.00

For more than a decade, Letting Go has provided hundreds of thousands of parents with valuable insights, information, comfort, and guidance throughout the emotional and social changes of their children's college years — from the senior year in high school through college graduation. Based on research and real life experience, and recommended by colleges and universities around the country, Letting Go, Sixth Edition, has been updated and revised, offering even more insightful, practical, and up-to-date information. In this era of constant communication, this edition tackles the challenge facing parents: finding the balance between staying connected and letting go.

• When should parents encourage independence?
• When should they intervene?
• What issues of identity and intimacy await students?
• What are normal feelings of disorientation and loneliness for students — and for parents?
• What is different about today's college environment?
• What new concerns about safety, health and wellness, and stress will affect incoming classes?

A timeless resource, Letting Go, Sixth Edition, is an indispensable book that parents can depend on and turn to for all of their questions and concerns regarding sending their children to college.

Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone. Richard Settersten & Barbara Ray, $17.00

The media has been flooded with negative headlines about 20-somethings, from their sense of entitlement to their immaturity to their dependence on their parents’ purse strings. The message is that these young people need to shape up and grow up — that they should take a fast track to adulthood just like their parents did. Now, drawing on almost a decade of cutting-edge scientific research, including analyses of over two dozen national data sets and 500 interviews with young people, Richard Settersten, Ph.D., and Barbara Ray shatter these widespread stereotypes. Settersten and Ray bring us a more nuanced understanding of this generation, and of the unique challenges they are facing as they come of age.

Not Quite Adults gets to the heart of how and why the course to adulthood has become so complicated, what these changes mean for families, and what we should do about it. The authors show how cultural and economic forces have radically transformed the “traditional” path to adulthood, creating a very different set of challenges as well as opportunities for today’s young adults. Filled with timely information and illuminating case histories, Not Quite Adults is a fascinating and enlightening look at an often misunderstood generation.

Parenting Your Emerging Adult: Launching Kids from 18 to 29. Varda Konstam, $21.95

Faced with a higher cost of living, higher college debt loads and a sense of material entitlement, many young adults are clinging to the parental nest. Some 56 percent of men and 48 percent of women 18 to 24 years old are living with their already strapped parents. Needless to say, parents of emerging adults are clearly “stressed out” and in need of practical, credible advice. PARENTING YOUR EMERGING ADULT is designed to be empowering and uplifting by offering the tools parents need to get their emerging adults living successfully out on their own.

The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. William Damon, $21.00

The Path to Purpose looks at youth who are thriving — highly engaged in activities they love and developing a clear sense of what they want to do with their lives — and youth who are still rudderless, at serious risk of never fulfilling their potential. What makes the difference? Based on in-depth interviews, Damon offers compelling portraits of the young people who are thriving.  He identifies the nine key factors that have made the difference for them, presenting simple but powerful methods that parents can employ in order to cultivate that energized sense of purpose in young people that will launch them on the path to a deeply satisfying and productive life.

Slouching Toward Adulthood: How to Let Go So Your Kids Can Grow Up. Sally Koslow, $17.00

Parents once dreamed of dropping their prodigies at first-choice colleges and sighing with relief at a job well done. Nowadays, though, mothers and fathers are stressing about whether Jessica or Josh will boomerang back after graduation — and still be there years later. Panicked after reading that 28 is the new 19, Sally Koslow — journalist and mother — searched for answers. SLOUCHING TOWARD ADULTHOOD is a heartfelt cri de coeur that can help families negotiate life around the unexpectedly crowded dining tables for years to come.

Someone Really Oughta Tell You: Life Strategies for Young Adults and Life Renovators. Di Gibson, $29.95

Have you ever wished that someone would tell you how to manage the day-to-day details of your life? Give you practical tips and realistic strategies for making your life easier? Talk to you about how to manage your finances, relationships, work life? And what about finding a place to live? Taxes? Insurance? SOMEONE REALLY OUGHTA TELL YOU is a down-to-earth guide for young adults (and anyone else who needs a boost) that tells you what you need to know. Straight up.

WHY THIS BOOK?

• It's full of practical, pared down, easy-to-implement tips that work
• It acknowledges that your time and patience are finite
• It comes in readily chewable chunks from which you can pick and choose
• It helps with the how, not just the what-to-do
• It's designed to help you live life on your terms
• And, like the author, it's slightly irreverent

IT WILL HELP YOU:

• Sort through your priorities
• Improve your decision-making strategies
• Figure out your strengths and manage your weaknesses
• Design and implement - or renovate - your goals
• Get a better handle on your day, week, year, your life
• Better steer your money so that you get more joy and benefit from it
• Learn how to better protect You and Yours
• And how to improve your happiness, influence, and resilience

The Teenage Brain: a Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults. Frances Jensen, with Amy Ellis Nutt, $18.99

Driven by the assumption that brain growth was pretty much complete by the time a child began kindergarten, scientists believed for years that the adolescent brain was essentially an adult one — only with fewer miles on it. Over the last decade, however, the scientific community has learned that the teen years encompass vitally important stages of brain development.

Motivated by her personal experience of parenting two teenage boys, renowned neurologist Dr. Frances  Jensen gathers what we’ve discovered about adolescent brain functioning, wiring, and capacity and, in this groundbreaking, accessible book, explains how these eye-opening findings not only dispel commonly held myths about the teenage years, but also yield practical suggestions that will help adults and teenagers negotiate the mysterious world of adolescent neurobiology. Interweaving clear summary and analysis of research data with anecdotes, Dr. Jensen explores adolescent brain functioning and development in the contexts of learning and multitasking, stress and memory, sleep, addiction, and decision-making.

Rigorous yet accessible, warm yet direct, The Teenage Brain sheds new light on the brains — and behaviors — of adolescents and young adults, and analyzes this knowledge to share specific ways in which parents, educators, and even the legal system can help them navigate their way more smoothly into adulthood.

When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us: Letting Go of Their Problems, Loving Them Anyway and Getting On With Our Lives. Jane Adams, $17.00

How do today’s parents cope when the dreams we had for our children clash with reality? What can we do for our twenty- and even thirty-somethings who can’t seem to grow up? How can we help our depressed, dependent, or addicted adult children, the ones who can’t get their lives started, who are just marking time or even doing it? What’s the right strategy when our smart, capable grown kids won’t leave home or come boomeranging back? Who can we turn to when the kids aren’t all right and we, their parents, are frightened, frustrated, resentful, embarrassed, and especially, disappointed?

In this groundbreaking book, a social psychologist who’s been chronicling the lives of American families for over two decades confronts our deepest concerns, including our silence and self-imposed sense of isolation, when our grown kids have failed to thrive. She listens to a generation that “did everything right” and expected its children to grow into happy, healthy, successful adults. But they haven’t, at least, not yet — and meanwhile, we’re letting their problems threaten our health, marriages, security, freedom, careers or retirement, and other family relationships.

With warmth, empathy, and perspective, Dr. Adams offers a positive, life-affirming message to parents who are still trying to “fix” their adult children — Stop! She shows us how to separate from their problems without separating from them, and how to be a positive force in their lives while getting on with our own. As we navigate this critical passage in our second adulthood and their first, When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us reminds us that the pleasures and possibilities of post-parenthood should not depend on how our kids turn out, but on how we do!