Product Details
Author: Urska Podvrsic, self-published
Design: Maja Licul
Length: 136 pages
Paperback
Book blurb
Parenting today can feel like both a miracle and a maze – exhilarating, disorienting, and, at times, quietly isolating.
An Ode to Connection is a heartfelt invitation to slow down, reflect, and find your way back to what matters most. Blending memoir with psychological and anthropological insight, it explores what it means to raise children – while raising ourselves – in a world that often pulls us away from presence, meaning, and one another.
With courage, vulnerability, and just enough humor to survive the emotional rollercoaster of raising tiny humans, a psychologist and mother of two daughters shares her journey through the layered terrain of parenthood – as part of life in all its complexity. What begins as a reckoning with disconnection, loneliness, and a lost sense of belonging becomes a deeply human search for connection: within herself, with her children, and with the world around her.
Grounded in lived experience, informed by years of working with children and teens from challenging backgrounds and later with expectant and new parents, the author weaves together personal stories, scientific insights, and the quiet truths that science can’t always capture – the contradictions that make us human.
The book also offers a sharp, compassionate unpacking of the broader cultural forces that shape how we parent and connect – how disconnection, pressure, and today’s faster pace seep into everyday life and what it takes to find resilience in the midst of it all. In this context, the author reintroduces babywearing not only as a practical tool but also as a profoundly human way to begin our parenting journeys – more connected, both in body and heart.
It doesn’t promise answers. It offers something better: resonance, recognition, and a powerful reminder that we’re not alone.
The author closes the book with a letter to her daughters – yes (!) – but her message resonates with anyone daring to raise the next generation with intention, courage, and heart.
A gentle revolution begins here.
Yanike Sophie –
Ode to Connection brings together everything many parents instinctively feel, and backs it up with research from several scientific fields. Urška Podvršič weaves her knowledge as a psychologist, mother, and baby-wearing consultant into a story that is easy to read, straight-forward, and often touched with humor.
As a mother of two young children searching for community, I found the book deeply recognizable and comforting. It gave me not only validation for the challenges of early parenthood but also a hopeful sense of what motherhood can look like in the years ahead.
Branka –
Being a mother is a woman’s most beautiful calling.
But so much of it is somehow taken for granted – that you will build a good relationship, act the right way, show love in the right manner, and set boundaries firmly. Yet it isn’t that clear or easy, and many insights only come once a certain period has already passed.
Urška has subtly brought forward the theme of the intimate bond between mother and child – and she does so at a time when so much emphasis is placed on spending just a few “quality” hours a day with a child! A child is not a project, but a loving little being who needs us all the time, or at least as much and as fully as possible.
It will be with great joy that I gift this book to my two daughters, once this becomes their story.
With gratitude.