In PARENT LIKE IT MATTERS: How to Raise Joyful, Change-Making Girls (Ballantine Books; On Sale: March 2, 2021), Dr. Johnson Dias shows us how, beginning with the idea that we must teach girls to lift as they climb—and to pull others along with them. Dr. Johnson Dias knows that self-realized girls are created through intentional parenting. And so, she asks parents to make deliberate choices from babyhood through adolescence that will give their girls the resources and foundation to take hold of their own futures and to create sustainable social change.

Unlike other parenting experts, Dr. Johnson Dias does not urge parents to focus solely on their children. Instead, she tasks them with a personal challenge: to find their own joy. Just as she brings her own jubilant passion to parenting, mentoring, and teaching, she inspires caregivers to do the same. The book offers information and strategies for making discussions of racism and sexism as a daily practice, identifying heroes and mentors, educating yourselves together, and uncovering your girl’s passions and what issues drive her the most.

Parenting is enormous work; it can be as overwhelming as it is fulfilling. Within the pages of PARENT LIKE IT MATTERS—a game changer in the parenting category—parents will find the invaluable tools they need to raise resilient, optimistic girls who dream big and determine for themselves what their world will look like. Informed by personal experience, mixed with expert insights and anecdotes from Dr. Johnson Dias’ decades-long work with girls, the book is a manifesto on how we can raise not just happy and healthy girls, but also a generation of young women capable of transforming our world.

As Jacqueline Woodson shares in the Foreword,