Books like Why Love Matters — picked by fans

Books offering support to parents have come on in leaps and bounds since the days when Gina Ford and Supernanny-style discipline reigned supreme. This book is my go-to book for practical advice.

Perry, a psychotherapist with more than 20 years of experience, is not interested in manipulating children’s behaviour with naughty steps and sticker charts. Her approach may incidentally help to get your children to brush their teeth and eat their vegetables, but her emphasis is on the far deeper and more important business of how to build a mutually respectful and cooperative relationship. Her voice is wise and refreshingly nonjudgmental.

This is one for parents who, in Perry’s words, "Not only love their children but want to like them, too”.

Fiction can help parents and children put our situations into perspective. During lockdown, my 10-year-old and I treasured some rare moments of calm reading Judith Kerr’s book.

This classic children’s book tells the story of a Jewish family’s escape from Nazi Germany and subsequent exile in Switzerland and France. It surveys some of the most dramatic events of the 20th century with a convincing child’s-eye view and reassures us that a loving family can survive and even thrive in the very worst of times.

Mindfulness is an essential tool when it comes to surviving family life under pressure. There are hundreds of books on this topic, but for a practical guide, I would first turn to this book by Maitreyabandhu.

The author is a senior teacher at the London Buddhist Centre; this eight-week course is steeped in ancient spiritual teachings but aimed squarely at modern, secular readers who are contending with complicated lives.

In my own precious novel-reading time, I have found myself turning to books that look frankly and fondly at familial imperfection.

This book by Miriam Toews follows Hattie, her 11-year-old niece Thebes, and her 15-year-old nephew Logan as they cross the US in a dilapidated camper van, looking for the kids’ father.

Toews combines comedy with proper heartbreak to remind us that, in a messed-up world, we are sustained by the love of our families–flaws and all.

By three years of age, toddler brains are two and half times as active as those of adults and they stay that way for a decade. New brain imaging techniques reveal how powerful adult-child positive interactions are for enhancing brain development from birth. With large print, charming infant and toddler photos, and easy-to-read charts, this book should galvanize parents and program personnel to support care providers’ frequent, sensitive, and enriching social interactions from birth onward to enhance and optimize early brain development.

I picked up this book because I loved Niven’s beautiful novel All The Bright Places, and she did not disappoint. The way Libby, once known as “America’s Fattest Teen,” deals with her unwelcome notoriety, as well as the death of her mother and her grieving father, is genuine and honest. As is her desire to make a new life and identify for herself as she enters high school. Her relationship with the handsome and popular Jack, and her ability to see through his façade, happens because she takes the time to be curious about what’s beyond the surface.

I fell into and out of love all the time. It just never worked for me. It turns out that falling in love and loving are not the same. According to Helen Fisher, lust, romantic love, and long-term committed love are different states. She scanned the brains of people in love to find out which regions were active when someone was madly in love and mapped that state to brain chemicals. Romantic love, she found, is literally an addiction, activating the same brain systems and chemicals as opioids. I was hooked on romance, falling into it over and over instead of moving to the stage of deep and long-lasting love.

Fisher explains the role of three brain chemicals in lust, romantic, and committed love: dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. Understanding what’s going on in my brain in romantic love helped me look beyond that crazy feeling to find a deep connection.

Supported by a wide range of examples drawn from various disciplines, this book demonstrates how we are only conscious of a small amount of what our hidden psychological machinery manufactures nonconsciously.

This work provides a key perspective needed to appreciate Julian Jaynes’s theory of consciousness and, thus his ideas on bicameral mentality. 

I am deeply engaged in the lifelong work of neuroscientist Nina Kraus in the area of sound and music. My background as a sound designer and neuroscientist resonates with Dr. Kraus’ curiosity to unravel the mysteries of how we hear and make sense of the sonic world.

I really was blown away when she demonstrated how a famous rock melody created an electric signal in the brain of the listener, which was then transformed back into an audio signal that sounded exactly like the original melody. This book is full of hardcore explanations about the wondrous experience of the human brain’s interpretation of our world of sound, which I use for self-exploration and professional application in sound design.

V. S. Ramachandran is a gifted experimentalist and writer who does not hesitate to pursue deep and important questions about our minds. Rather than employing expensive imaging or large sample sizes, he is more likely to use a cardboard box, an old stereopticon, or a rubber hand in his experiments. 

His creativity in finding concrete ways to test seemingly vague but interesting claims about our minds has led to several breakthroughs, in our understanding of phantom limbs and our ability to treat phantom pain, and also in our study of synesthesia—cases in which people see numbers as having colors, for example.

As I can attest, he is able to transmit to his students the idea that pursuing scientific questions can be thrilling, fulfilling, and so much fun that you can’t wait to get to work in the morning.