Balancing school dropoffs, fall sports schedules, family dinners and personal time is no easy task, but Cool Moms and Cool Dads handle it all with style and a sense of humor. Treat yourself to our fall collection of parenting and lifestyle books, featuring hilariously relatable memoirs, insightful family guidance, cozy contemporary fiction, and lighthearted adult reads. With insight from warm, witty and honest voices like Jenny Mollen, Glennon Doyle, Hank Green and Mike Birbiglia, these books offer the perfect literary escape after the kids are finally in bed.
September Parenting & Lifestyle Book Releases
Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines
by Sherry Turkle
From the author of prescient best seller and classic Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle, comes an urgent warning about how our ever-increasing reliance on human-like AI chatbots is eroding our capacity for empathy, caring, and the very qualities that make us human.
If social media came for our attention, artificial intelligence is now coming for our capacity for attachment. Chatbots that speak to us in a human voice offer themselves as best friends, lovers, and psychotherapists. As of 2025, over 70% of teens and nearly one-third of US adults rely on AI for companionship and emotional support, with many preferring these chatbot relationships over human ones.
When we talk to chatbots in these roles, as intimate machines, we accept as sufficient what machines can offer: the mere performance of intimacy, empathy, and love. We begin to think that pretend empathy is empathy enough. We redefine human capacities for care, solitude, and intimacy in terms of what machines can do. Sherry Turkle, the psychologist who pioneered our understanding of human-computer relationships, calls the new culture of chatbots artificial intimacy, our new AI.
Through compelling storytelling, framed by Turkle's decades of experience as a chronicler and analyst of digital culture, Artificial Intimacy evokes the seductive and beguiling nature of chatbots. They can organize our calendars, plan our travel, or analyze our stock picks, all with an efficiency that outstrips what a person might do.
Artificial Intimacy is unique in how it traces our new habit of talking to machines through the lifecycle--from children's earliest attachments to how we face death.
Feed Them Well: A Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident Eaters for Life
by Jennifer Anderson
From Jennifer Anderson--registered dietitian and founder of Kids Eat in Color, trusted by over two million parents--comes the evidence-based guide to feeding children from baby's first foods through the teen years.
When you became a parent, you probably thought feeding your child would be the easy part. You swore you'd never bribe your kid with dessert, never make a separate meal because it was easier than a standoff, never hear yourself say, "just try it," in a voice that didn't sound like your own.
Or maybe feeding was easy for years--until your child came home one day and said, "My friend says bread makes you fat," and you froze. Maybe your tween started picking at their plate after a pediatrician visit. Maybe your toddler who ate everything suddenly won't touch anything green. Now what?
Every parent wants to feed their kids well--but between picky eating, battles with sugar, confusing nutrition headlines, and the fear of saying the wrong thing about food or bodies, it's hard to feel confident about any of it. Now, in Feed Them Well, Anderson gives you the exact words, scripts, and tools you need to navigate it all--without judgment, guilt, or perfection required.
You'll learn how to talk about food without planting the seeds of diet culture. How to handle sugar, snacks, treats, and dessert in a way that actually works--at home, at birthday parties, at Grandma's house. What to do when your child refuses vegetables or gags on textures. How to navigate weight conversations when doctors, family, or other kids bring it up. And how to cut through nutrition confusion to figure out what truly matters for your family.
Homemaking with Babs: Tips and Tricks for Making a House a Home
by Barbara Costello
From the New York Times bestselling author of Every Day with Babs, comes Babs' life-tested advice and tricks for setting up, cleaning, and maintaining an organized, happy, and healthy home.
Everyone's favorite grandma is back with a comprehensive guide to caring for the home, whether you live in a house or apartment. Through their decades of experience as homeowners, Babs and her husband--aka Mr. Babs--have figured out the most efficient way to manage a home with ease. From daily routines to seasonal cleaning, organizing, and home maintenance, Babs shares her innovative methods and family traditions that make homemaking simple and enjoyable.
Perfect for renters and homeowners alike, Homemaking with Babs also includes DIY solutions for natural cleaning and pest control, making it a valuable resource for anyone looking to create a peaceful and well-maintained home. With more than 150 full-color photographs, this book offers advice and tips covering:
- Clean in 15: Practical routines for morning and nighttime that you can do in no time, along with daily, weekly, and monthly reminders to keep the home running smoothly.
- Seasonal cleaning and organizing: Detailed checklists and tips for spring, summer, fall, and winter, including specific tasks for each area of the home.
- Home maintenance: Guidance on maintaining home systems, planning for repairs, and creating a home maintenance fund.
- Natural recipes: DIY recipes for natural cleaners, pest deterrents, and seasonal simmer pots to keep the home fresh and healthy.
- Get everyone involved: Tips for getting everyone in the household involved in homemaking tasks, from kids to adults.
With more than 100 easy home hacks, practical tips, and seasonal checklists to help readers manage their homes with ease, Homemaking with Babs makes managing the home feel, well, manageable!
Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best
by Angela Duckworth
From the #1 bestselling author of Grit, a new book that reveals the hidden power of situations and how you can shape them to bring out your best.
In Angela Duckworth's first book, she showed that a common denominator of successful strivers is a blend of passion and perseverance she dubbed "grit." This second book springs from her deepening realization that grit, while necessary, is sometimes not sufficient. How you situate yourself to meet a challenge can be crucial.
Duckworth's in-depth research reveals the enormous influence wielded by the objects within arm's reach, your peers and mentors, and even your zip code. Though you're often told to make the best of your situation, it is far, far better to make your situation better first.
In Situated, you'll discover:
- Why your personality changes, sometimes dramatically, from one situation to another--and how you can harness that shift
- The secret to conquering temptation without willpower
- Why taking the less effortful path can feel like cheating but often solves a stubborn problem
- How the company you keep shapes the person you become
- The most effective ways to help others succeed
Highlighting four essential elements of successful situations, Duckworth shows how high performers like Taylor Swift, Michael Phelps, and Jerry Seinfeld create situations that make it easier to excel. And, with disarming honesty, she shares her own struggles with burnout and marriage--and how learning to change her situation, not herself, made all the difference. Whatever it is you want to achieve, there's a situation that can make your journey easier.
Think Like a Dog: How Positive Psychology Can Help Your Dog Thrive
by Jen Golbeck
The surprising science that explains how and why your dog thinks and acts from Jen Golbeck, the "internet's dog mom" behind the popular Golden Ratio Squad online community and the author of the "fascinating" (First for Women) The Purest Bond.
Do dogs' brains work the same as humans? Are they capable of the same spectrum of emotions as us? Do they have a sense of self? What the heck is wrong with this crazy dog?
Like many of us, Jen Golbeck looked at her rescue golden retrievers and affectionately wondered what exactly was going on in their cute, fuzzy heads. But as a left-brained scientist, Golbeck set out to seek concrete answers--research and data--to back up the hunch that there's a lot more going on beneath the surface of our pups' funny looks and adorable, occasionally destructive, behaviors.
What she finds is a surprising relationship between positive psychology and how we might learn to think about how our dogs think in a whole new light. She introduces a mold-breaking concept that shifts our focus from solving problems and scolding "bad behavior" to building on strengths based on qualities like focus, vitality, and curiosity.
Through fascinating case studies, real data, and paws-on-the-ground research and with Golbeck's signature "encouraging" (Library Journal) prose, Think Like a Dog shows how to apply these ideas thoughtfully, consistently, and with compassion, to help our dogs not just behave better, but to truly thrive.
Twenty Minutes Is the New Hour: The Ambitious Woman's Guide to Doing Less and Achieving More
by Fran Hauser - Jodi Lipper
An indispensable guide to help women reclaim hours in their day by overcoming the Four 4P's--People Pleasing, Procrastination, Perfectionism, and Padding--from the acclaimed author of The Myth of the Nice Girl.
"A liberating reframing of time in a culture that equates busyness with worth."-- Jennifer B. Wallace, New York Times bestselling author of Mattering and Never Enough
Women often carry a different kind of time load--one that adds up in ways that aren't always visible but deeply felt. Often, these responsibilities cause us to fall prey to what Fran Hauser calls "The 4 P's"--people-pleasing, perfectionism, procrastination, and (time) padding. Whether it's saying yes when you know you don't have the bandwidth, rewriting an email for the tenth time, or sitting through meetings that go nowhere, these patterns chip away at our hours, leaving less time for what truly matters. But when we start paying attention to these habits, we begin to change our relationship with time.
In Twenty Minutes Is the New Hour, Hauser shows professional women how to embrace a "twenty-minute mindset" to create more time and space for themselves and their most meaningful work. This mindset helps us break free from the 4 P's, stop over-rotating and make progress in less time than we think we need.
Drawing on Hauser's decades of executive experience--and stories from successful women such as Sprinkles Founder Candace Nelson and Journalist Danielle Robay-- Twenty Minutes is the New Hour is equal parts accessible and actionable. You'll come away with important tools, including:
- The secret recipe for getting an effective meeting done in 20 minutes
- A messy action mindset to help you start (and keep going)
- Ways to streamline projects and negotiations that have become overly complex
- Frameworks for nailing high-stakes conversations without overthinking
- A simple weekly practice to create space on your calendar
Twenty Minutes Is the New Hour is the antidote to our always-on, overworked world and a fresh take on productivity. The goal isn't to do more. It's to focus on what matters--and feel good about how you're doing it.
Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment
by PhD Franco
From the New York Times bestselling author of Platonic, a groundbreaking guide exploring the promise (and limits) of secure attachment to help us feel better and boost our self-esteem.
"I can't think of anyone who won't need this book." --Jen Hatmaker, New York Times bestselling author and host of For the Love
What if what you thought you knew about secure attachment was wrong? Or worse, making you more insecure?
Dr. Marisa G. Franco is the New York Times bestselling friendship expert whose advice Glennon Doyle calls "wise, concrete, and effective"--Dr. Franco literally wrote the book on how to become a securely attached friend. But since then, she's realized that when we feel unworthy, the things we think should make us feel secure and raise our self-esteem often backfire:
- Optimistic self-talk makes us feel worse, not better.
- Positive feedback raises our blood pressure.
- Compliments make us uncomfortable.
- Positive events make us sicker.
The good news: Self-esteem is a skill that can be learned--and you can get better at it, which in turn strengthens all your other relationships. In Worth, Dr. Franco mines promising new research at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience to show us why so many of us still struggle with self-esteem (even in this self-obsessed age), and how we can build a foundation of lasting self-worth that doesn't rely on likes or followers.
You Are the Parent: Move from Overparenting to Balanced Parenting and Become the Leader Your Child Needs
by Cohen Siggie Cohen Siggie
Dr. Siggie Cohen, beloved parenting expert and influencer behind the viral @dr.siggie, shares a profound framework that will empower a new generation of parents to lead with confidence and enjoy less chaotic, more harmonious, happier homes.
Do you feel like you're stuck in a power struggle with your little one and he might be winning?
If so, you're not alone. Modern parenting has become a quagmire of good intentions gone wrong--too many of us are over-accommodating, over-explaining, over-negotiating, over-emphasizing, and over-fixing. This trend of over-parenting is leaving our children without strong coping skills and trapping us in never-ending tug-of-wars for control.
It's time for a more balanced approach. It's time for parents to trust themselves again.
Bringing decades of experience in early childhood education and developmental psychology--with millions of social media fans who swear by her advice--Dr. Siggie Cohen is here to cut through the noise and reassure you that parenting doesn't have to be this hard or this complicated.
You can become the calm, confident leader your family needs, while still parenting with empathy and prioritizing essential connection. Dr. Siggie's Emotional/Behavioral Proficiency (EBP) method offers a simple, yet groundbreaking framework to understand the root cause of your child's behavior, so you can effectively manage common challenges while raising a more resilient and confident kid.
Through relatable, real-life examples and actionable strategies, you will learn to see past the problem behaviors to the unmet needs beneath. With advice for true parenting pain points, like:
- Discipline--and why it's not what you think it is
- Little kids, big tornadoes--handling tantrums and outbursts
- Navigating transitions and change
- Dealing with lying, stealing, and bragging
- Whhyyyyyy kids whine, and how to help them stop
You Are the Parent provides helpful scripts and tools to set firm, loving boundaries while teaching your child the emotional skills they need to navigate their world and build a foundation of self-regulation.
For more book recommendations, check out our guide to new releases for The Hobbyist or Trendsetter. You may also enjoy our YA picks for the Young At Heart.