For journalist Ron Fournier, connecting with his youngest child, Tyler, wasn’t easy: Tyler hated sports, which his dad loved, and he was socially awkward, which made Fournier cringe. His warmhearted memoir, Love That Boy, details a father’s journey to understand and bond with his son, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the relatively late age of 12.

One thread of the memoir follows father and son on a series of post-diagnosis road trips. Tyler loves history and Fournier is a former White House correspondent, so they visit presidential house-museums—the White House; Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill; the Adams home in Quincy; Jefferson’s Monticello. Fournier tries to connect the dots for Tyler: Roosevelt suffered asthma and was bullied as a child but grew up to be wildly popular, he tells him. “You’re trying too hard,” Tyler says.

Divided into two parts, “What We Want” and “What We Need,” the memoir is also a familiar meditation on parenting—our outsize expectations for our kids’ success, popularity and happiness. To get at these issues, Fournier interviews other parents, some who have a child with Asperger’s or depression, others who call themselves tiger moms. Fournier intersperses these with his family’s story, including the slow path to Tyler’s diagnosis and one daughter’s adolescent struggles. He’s clear-eyed about his own shortcomings—he repeatedly put work ahead of family, and his anxious expectations for his college-age daughters, Holly and Gabrielle, led him to give them wrong-headed advice (which they wisely ignored).

Fournier also secured substantial visits with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he vividly describes the former presidents’ empathy and generosity with Tyler, who didn’t make those visits easy. But Love That Boy is most affecting when we see how far Tyler has come since his diagnosis and how far his father has come as well.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If the teen years are a difficult passage, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood seeks to map the journey, at least as it relates to girls. Lisa Damour divides this "tangle" into seven strands (parting with childhood, harnessing emotions, etc.) and offers wisdom drawn from her research and experience to help parents and, really, anyone who has girls in their care to understand and assist the process. Her advice is clear-headed, to the point and often surprising.

A psychologist and director of Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls, Damour advises adults to make their limits clear and preferences known, but warns that if a girl responds with eye-rolling derision not to panic. Putting it out there consistently offers a sense of security to girls, who often want more boundaries than their behavior would suggest.

Damour brings a relaxed view to most situations, but tells parents to be careful about trying to regulate the two areas where a girl has control: homework and eating. She encourages girls to find creative ways to deal with the flawed adults in their lives as good practice for adulthood, recalling a student whose rebellion against her incompetent parents involved failing in school. Damour was quick to point out that if they were so awful, a strategy that ensured she'd be living with them indefinitely was not the way to go.

If you've puzzled over young female behavior, Untangled will help decode it. This childless reader couldn't put it down. It's a wise, funny, highly insightful guide to the mysterious minefield of adolescence.

What are the effects of children on their parents? Academics have long studied the question, and most readers have some back-of-the-hand knowledge of the subject. But rarely have those two groups been in conversation—until now. Jennifer Senior successfully connects a barrage of scholarship with the real experiences of moms and dads, and the resulting book, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, is completely fascinating.

Chapters are organized loosely by stage of childhood, explaining how each stage impacts parents. Infancy leads to sleeplessness, toddlerhood to constant negotiation, middle childhood to overscheduled lives, and so on. Senior is a skilled writer who can take the reader into a particular scene, say, a kitchen in Brooklyn. But she can also beautifully gloss a complicated academic text and then pull out a quote so lovely you want to tack it on your wall.

Senior is a terrific guide to the subject, in part because she’s not afraid to offer a dissenting opinion. Take the oft-cited studies of parents who report less happiness with the birth of each successive child. Such studies, Senior argues, leave a lot out. Yes, life with children might not be much fun. But there’s something different to be had with children: meaning, connectedness, legacy. Joy. Parents are in it for the long game.

As the mother of a 3-year-old, I found myself underlining passages that begged to be shared with friends. Did you know, for instance, that the average toddler only listens 60 percent of the time? You, too, might see your situation reflected in these pages.

In short, All Joy and No Fun is a terrific read that speaks to something so present, yet so intangible: how each generation of children inevitably and irrevocably changes the generation of parents who bore them.