Is it even possible to be sane, calm and connected in the chaos of parenting? Yes!

Somewhere in our over-scheduled and frantic lives we’ve lost our intuition around how to bring up kids. Our children come with all they need to flourish to their full potential, and yet we’ve accessorised the parent-child relationship beyond recognition, creating a world of stress for parents and kids.

The Mindful Parent changes all that. It’s a timely and liberating journey back to the heart of what really matters — a deep and lasting relationship with our children. Its unique approach leads us to that deep connection by weaving together the latest in neuroscience, personal story and deceptively simple strategies that are so kind and effective it’s hard not to use them. Each chapter reexamines a different area of our parenting lives — our busyness and stress levels; our more difficult emotions; our challenging core beliefs; our essential connection with our children; our children’s tricky emotions; and the struggle of conflict-management. There is more un-learning than learning in this book. It will be read with a huge sigh of relief, a new sense of joy and a realisation that the expertise to parent well is already deep within each one of us.

Shirley Pastiroff is a counsellor, mindfulness trainer and parent coach. She has trained thousands of parents in the techniques described in this book, and now works across the education and commercial sectors as well as with individuals and families. Shirley is a former BBC documentary-maker and lives in Auckland with her husband and five children.

Team Pick

I attended Shirley's Mindful Parenting course a couple of years ago and it changed the parenting game for me. When Shirley released her book I just had to sell it at Global Baby. Shirley's approach is relatable, peppered with examples of her own experience as a mum of five, readable, and it's based in science. It's about changing yourself, your thoughts and your neural pathways, to gently shift your relationship with your children. Filled with information, examples, diagrams, and exercises, I highly recommend this book.

- Anita