Please Yell at My Kids: What Cultures Around the World Can Teach You about Parenting in Community, Raising Independent Kids, and Not Losing Yo

Acclaimed journalist Marina Lopes travels the world to learn how diverse cultures embrace communal parenting, bringing home practical strategies for American parents on how to stop doing it all, reimagine their communities, and build their own village.

Parenting in America is notoriously challenging: no federally supported parental leave, a lack of mental health support, a crushing combination of workplace pressure and aspirational parental perfection, and the fresh hell that is the playgroup Facebook page. But what if there was a better way?
The simple fact is that parenting looks wildly different across nations. In Please Yell at My Kids, journalist Marina Lopes travels the globe, learning from parents in Singapore, Brazil, Mozambique, Malaysia, Sweden, China, and more to provide practical, actionable ways to reimagine parenting in America. At the heart of many global approaches to parenting lies one simple and not-so-simple element: community. In America, parenting is, at best, a dual mission. But globally, parenthood is more often a team sport played in the center of a community that helps, supports, and occasionally drives you up the wall. What can we learn from Brazilian birth parties, Singaporean grandparents, and Danish babies sleeping soundly outside of coffee shops? And how can that be integrated into the lives of American readers, even if we can't hop on a plane and wing our way to the land of paid parental leave?
From guiding readers on how to define their own non-negotiable values to navigating tricky conversations with their in-laws, Please Yell at My Kids empowers parents to create a supportive community of care, rediscover the joy in parenting, and raise resilient, independent children--without having to go it alone.

Author: Marina Lopes
Publisher: Balance
Published: 04/22/2025
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Size: 9.25h x 6.25w x 1.01d
ISBN: 9780306834417

About the Author
Marina Lopes is a Brazilian- American journalist who has written about feminism, caregiving, and motherhood across five continents. From 2016 through 2020, Marina covered Brazil for the Washington Post.
Her reporting took her from the remote corners of Brazil's Amazon rainforest, where she interviewed female shamans challenging gender norms in their tribes, to Rio's gang-controlled favelas, where she spoke to mothers who lost their children to gun violence. In Brazil's Zika-infected northeast, she chronicled the devastation of the epidemic on families living in poverty. Her article on the spread of the Venezuelan diaspora in South America was nominated by the Washington Post for a Pulitzer Prize. She was also a 2019 recipient of an International Women's Media Foundation Grant for her coverage of sex trafficking rings in the Amazon. Her 2018 series on how gay Brazilians confronted the rise of homophobia in Bolsonaro's Brazil was nominated for a GLAAD award for outstanding newspaper article.
Before joining the Post, she was a correspondent for Reuters in Mozambique. Her work has been published by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the BBC, PBS, Vice, and others. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and two children.