Intensive Parenting

Parenthood transforms you. Even before this crisis, you may have experienced a wide range of feelings triggered by pregnancy, birth, and welcoming a new baby. The NICU experience challenges your emotional coping, your developing parental identity, your relationship skills, and your ability to adjust.
Intensive Parenting explores the emotions of parenting in the neonatal intensive care unit, from in-hospital through issues and concerns after the child is home. Deborah L. Davis and Mara Tesler Stein describe and affirm the wide range of experiences and emotional reactions that occur in the NICU and offer strategies for parents coping with their baby's condition and hospitalization.

Deborah L. Davis, Ph.D., is best known for her first book, Empty Cradle, Broken Heart: Surviving the Death of Your Baby. More than 30 years ago, Fulcrum understood the need for such a book (now in its 3rd edition), thus launching Debbie's successful writing career. Her other books include the award-winning Parenting Your Premature Baby and Child (with Mara Tesler Stein, Psy.D.), plus four others that guide and support parents around the heart-wrenching topics of stillbirth, neonatal intensive care, hospice, and palliative care, and pediatric medical ethics.

Debbie is uniquely qualified to fill this niche, having graduate degrees in developmental psychology from the University of Massachusetts, supplemented with education and research at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She has also contributed to a number of other books written for parents, as well as book chapters, position statements, and workshops aimed at professionals. Her blog, Laugh, Cry, Live, explores a wide range of topics @ PsychologyToday.com.

As a writer who happily sets her own hours, she is able to play a lot of doubles volleyball, go social dancing late into the night, and pick the coldest, snowiest days to ski near the Continental Divide, west of Denver, Colorado.

Mara Tesler Stein, Psy.D., PMH-C is a clinical psychologist practicing in the United States and Israel. She is the founder and director of The Touchstone Institute for Psychotherapy and Training where she offers both EMDR Foundational trainings for perinatal specialists & advanced EMDR workshops which take a deeper dive into the intersections and applications of EMDR and perinatal mental health.

Dr. Stein is a staunch advocate for trauma-focused care and is trained and certified in a range of integrative trauma therapies. A certified EMDR therapist, EMDRIA Approved Consultant and Trainer, Dr. Stein is also certified in Emotion-Focused Family and Couple Therapy.