“Brilliant!”
“A must for all families!”

Download a 90 page sample of our book!


The Relational Book for Parenting

The Relational Book for Parenting (available on Amazon)  uses comics, fables, articles, and games to help families’ grow their relational intelligence in the daily back and forth of parenting. It’s a joyful, accessible, parent-friendly cure for what ails our isolating culture, helping us to raise a generation of young people better able to connect, collaborate and innovate across differences.

Couple and family therapist Saliha Bava, PhD, and Emmy winning author/illustrator Mark Greene explore our families’ powerful relational capacities. In their book, they chart a playful and transformative path to insuring we all, children and parents alike, can create joyful, lasting personal and professional relationships over the course of our lifetimes.

From the introduction:
Conversations and relationships go hand in hand. In fact, one does not exist without the  other. It is in the verbal and the non-verbal of communication that we come to exist. In our utterences and gestures, as witnessed and responded to by others, we are.

This relational call and response is the driving force of  parenting. Our kids call out, and we respond. How we respond to them, in turn, shapes their next interaction with us. Who we are, and who we are becoming, emerges from this interaction and communication. As we are shaping them, they are shaping us. Through our mutual participation, we create the messy, joyous process of parenting and being raised. All of life and living, all creativity, all play, all relationships emerge from the constant back and forth of relating.

Our book’s goal is to focus on a fundamental consideration: namely what happens when we mindfully center and care for our relationships. 

Relational thinking asks us to hold uncertainty, notice emergence and stay playful. It asks us to explore how, through the back and forth of relating, we co-create our roles as partners, parents and co-workers, how we are continually re-creating who we are, and how we make meaning.

Download a 90 page sample of our book!

The power of words: we make powerful meanings in the moment we apply language to our emotions. What happens if we pause before labeling these sensations? What gets created when we label our children’s emotions for them? Page 71 from the Relational Book of Parenting.
Growing our capacity to listen: How we hold our children’s difficult stories can help them work through and shift their challenging narratives. Page 94 from the Relational Book for Parenting

Reviews 

It’s such a sophisticated blend of theory and fun.The comic illustrations reinforce life-changing, culture-shaping ideas.  It is not exclusive. It is not exhausting. It is brilliant!
— Bronwyn Leiataua

The Relational Book for Parenting is a perfect, timely response to the question so many parents are now asking. Namely, how can we counteract the detrimental effects of socialization, particularly problems related to our emotional disconnections and isolation from others?
— Judy Chu, PhD, Stanford University’s Department of Human Biology, Author of When Boys Become Boys

I invite you and yours to hone your “family relationship superpowers” by engaging with this brilliant and captivating guide.
— Jacqueline Hudak, PhD, Clinical Director, Center for Couples and Adult Families, Perelman School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania

This book is a must-read for anyone who interacts with children, not only parents but also grandparents, teachers, aunts, and uncles. The reader will also come away with tips for more effective interpersonal communications in their adult relationships
— Lisa M. Blacker, Executive Editor at The Good Men Project

Within the present work by Saliha Bava and Mark Greene, we enter a new and more promising world.
— From the foreword by Kenneth J. Gergen, PhD

The Relational Book for Parenting is a fast, funny, creative read that helps families build their relationship super powers. A must for all families!
— Melanie Doyle, Human Development and Psychology teacher at Dawson College

Bava and Greene’s playful art and story translate complex theoryto day-by-day relational principles and practices. Placing parenting as cultural practice, the authors invite readers to move from individualism and isolation to culture that “mindfully centers and cares for relationships.”
— Carmen Knudson-Martin, Professor, Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling