Your Passport to Parenting explores parenting ideas from around the world, providing stories and lessons that demonstrate how values-based parenting can help create meaningful bonds between you and your child, while teaching them to be kind, secure, and empathetic.

In her best-selling children's book Take Heart, My Child, Ainsley Earhardt drew on her childhood and the inspirational notes her father wrote her before school each morning. In this moving memoir, she reminisces about growing up with a father who loved his children unconditionally - a cherished model of parenthood she has adopted with her own daughter - how her Christian faith has shaped her life, and the dynamic journalism career that has made her a trusted household name.

For much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class.

"Who am I, really?" is a question many adoptees ask when they realize they have another family of genetic relation. Damon L. Davis shares his journey through life as an adoptee to becoming an adoptive parent himself. He explores his desire to find his birth family as sparked by the flood of emotions that accompanied the birth of his son, Seth - the first blood relative he had ever known.

From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of 15 adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots.

Nice Leng`ete was raised in a Maasai village in Kenya. In 1998, when Nice was six, her parents fell sick and died, and Nice and her sister, Soila, were taken in by their father’s brother, who had little interest in the girls beyond what their dowries might fetch. Fearing “the cut” (female genital mutilation, a painful and sometimes deadly ritualistic surgery), which was the fate of all Maasai women, Nice and Soila climbed a tree to hide.

Born with the gift of hospitality, Kreis Beall helped create one of the nation’s most renowned resort destinations, Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountain foothills. For decades, she was a fixture in the travel and entertaining world and frequently appeared in the pages of popular home and design magazines. But at the pinnacle of her success, Kreis faced a series of challenges that reframed her life, including a brain injury that permanently impaired her hearing and the conclusion of her 36-year marriage to her best friend and business partner, Sandy Beall.

"How did you get this number?" Those were the first words Jill Biden spoke to US senator Joe Biden when he called her out of the blue to ask her on a date. Growing up, Jill had wanted two things: a marriage like her parents' - strong, loving, and full of laughter - and a career. An early heartbreak had left her uncertain about love until she met Joe. But as they grew closer, Jill faced difficult questions: How would politics shape her family and professional life? And was she ready to become a mother to Joe's two young sons?

The day we met in October of 1997, I was working at the District Court in Traverse City, Michigan as a Deputy Clerk. I loved my job. It was extremely satisfying and interesting with constant interaction with all walks of life, including people on either end of the judicial spectrum and many in between. Suddenly, there he was. Tall, handsome, and looking so impressive and important in his Michigan State Police uniform with his hat, gun belt, and badge. He was extremely friendly and upbeat, smiling profusely. Best of all, he, too, was unattached. What could go wrong?

The adoption business was founded on secrecy and lies. American Baby lays out how a lucrative and exploitative industry removed children from their birth mothers and placed them with hopeful families, fabricating stories about infants' origins and destinations, then closing the door firmly between the parties forever. Adoption agencies and other organizations that purported to help pregnant women struck unethical deals with doctors and researchers for pseudoscientific "assessments," and shamed millions of women into surrendering their children.

Thanks to her spiteful, jealous Jamaican mother, Nell Vera Lowe was cut off from her Chinese father, Samuel, when she was just a baby, after he announced that he was taking a Chinese bride. By the time Nell was old enough to travel to her father's shop in St. Anne's Bay, he'd taken his family back to China, never learning what became of his eldest daughter. Bereft, Nell left Jamaica for New York to start a new life.

These memoirs of the author's first twenty-four years are thoughtful, informative, and highly entertaining. They not only portray a young woman and her unique family in San Francisco's Chinatown, but they are rich in the details that light up a world within the world of America. The third-person singular style is rooted in Chinese literary form, reflecting cultural disregard for the individual, yet Jade Snow Wong's story also is typically American.

In 1970, three-day-old Marra B. Gad was adopted by a white Jewish family in Chicago. For her parents, it was love at first sight - but they quickly realized the world wasn’t ready for a family like theirs. Marra’s biological mother was unwed, white, and Jewish, and her biological father was Black. While still a child, Marra came to realize that she was “a mixed-race, Jewish unicorn”. In Black spaces, she was not “Black enough” or told that it was okay to be Christian or Muslim but not Jewish.

Love Like Fire is a timely, inspiring story of a modern-day Mother Teresa who embodies self-sacrifice and love. Amidst her passionate humanitarian work in Mozambique, Heidi Baker’s husband contracted cerebral malaria and soon after was diagnosed with dementia, the doctors giving him a death sentence. Heidi and her husband founded IRIS Ministries, a nonprofit Christian ministry.

Motherhood So White is the story of Nefertiti's fight to create the family she always knew she was meant to have and the story of motherhood that all American families need now. In this unflinching account of her parenting journey, Nefertiti examines the history of adoption in the African American community, faces off against stereotypes of single, Black motherhood, and confronts the reality of raising children of color in racially charged, modern-day America.