Theoretical and practical help with child-rearing, all filtered through a therapist’s eye.
: Reasonable, detailed suggestions from a child and family therapist for minimizing the stress of parenting and dealing with
common family issues. Koman’s focus is on the psychological issues in child-rearing—from both the parents’ and the children’s perspectives. She first offers "Seven Strategies for Surviving the Stress of Parenthood" (number one: begin by keeping expectations realistic). Koman’s take on parenthood is that it is "hard, messy, confusing, repetitive, often frustrating work"—and also one of the most wonderful experiences in life. Among her strategies for coping: Go at your child’s pace (it will avoid frustration all around) and make your home a haven, a safe place for each family member. In Part II of her guide, Koman covers "Parenting Issues and Crises and How to Deal With Them." Among the 55 topics, alphabetically arranged, are "Attachment and Bonding," "Latchkey Kids," "Scary Experiences and Childhood Fears," and "Work-to-Home Transitions." On this last point, she counsels, "Many parents tell me they feel as if they have two selves: a work self and a home self. The transition often creates a daily jolt." Besides identifying and explaining the psychology of the problem, Koman offers practical help: Many parent-child conflicts are caused or aggravated by hunger—so keep snacks for everyone available in the car for the trip home from work and daycare.
Theoretical and practical help with child-rearing, all filtered through a therapist’s eye.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-52580-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
An intriguing but weakly argued introduction to an underexplored subject. Youcha (coauthor, Drugs, Alcohol, and Your Children, 1989) contends that today's conflicts over day care are nothing new- -indeed, that children have always been looked after by complex and various combinations including relatives, older siblings, employers, paid strangers, intimately known slaves, servants, and settlement-house workers. She convincingly uses historical example to challenge the amnesiac contemporary notion that biological mothers have always been full-time care-givers. She also wrestles with some psychologically complicated historical situations: the colonial apprentice/master relationship (children as young as six could be hired out); Southern black ``mammies'' and white mistresses raising, often wet-nursing, each other's children; child factory labor; 19th-century utopian communities like the Shakers, in which children were the responsibility of the whole community and individual parent/child attachments were frowned on. She also examines 20th-century upper-class solutions like boarding schools and nannies, foster care, and postWW II comprehensive day care institutions. Her examples do add nuance to received wisdom about what constitutes traditional motherhood. But Youcha's narrative is inconsistent: Sometimes she tries to describe situations objectively; sometimes she adopts a decisively opinionated slant; her interpretations often falter and backpedal. Writing about the antebellum South, she cites evidence that children could become more attached to their mammies than to their mothers, yet in comparing the mammy to today's nannies, she discounts that possibility. She changes her tone abruptly, too, in characterizing the utopians as by turns unfeeling and progressive. There is ample evidence that their child-care practices were both of these things, but Youcha doesn't weave contradictory elements together. A solid use of provocative historical cases to raise new questions in the contemporary child-care debates, but with its rough style and chaotically veering judgments, it doesn't provide answers.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-19336-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
Candid and inspiring.
Redbook editor-in-chief Morrison finds a bigger, more honest and balanced self amid the ruins of her marriage.
The author had recently been fired from her magazine job, had an infant son and a house in Brooklyn when her husband sighed and pronounced, “I’m done with this.” To his credit, he didn’t bolt or have an affair, but stayed put until they ironed out the divorce process—though it would take a toll. In a firm, bell-clear voice, Morrison charts her passage from misery to redemption. It wasn’t easy, and the story plays well on her confusion—circling, revisiting, contradicting—reading like a tumult of self-recrimination. Hardly a shrinking violet, she lived at a somewhat cool remove, not trusting happiness. She worked too much; nothing was ever enough; she was volatile and dramatic: “The distance between my brain and my mouth is very, very short.” Yet that brain is capacious and active, and Morrison emerges as a sympathetic character, overthinking, overwhelmed and not blind to the irony of “running a magazine all about women and love and marriage and stuff…Isn’t it rich?” There is plenty of unhappiness in these pages—not self-indulgent, but revelatory—and it all leads to genuinely hard-won epiphanies that are gratifyingly modest and useful for readers in similar situations—don’t marinate in anger; beneath fear is solid ground; fix the immediate problems, often things happen “just because”; optimism and forgiveness work wonders. If her comparisons are sometimes unsettling—“divorce is no virus; it’s lung cancer”—readers will get the drift.
Candid and inspiring.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9556-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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