A sweeping and pleasingly empathetic guide to the problems of childrearing.
Rogers draws on her 32-year career as a clinical psychologist to offer a comprehensive approach to parenting young children.
In this guide, the author expounds on a series of treatment recommendations that aim to bring new insights to parent-child relationships and the earliest years of institutional education. Her book is broken up into four parts, first looking at the basics of problematic issues and behaviors and ways to address them; she then offers a long discussion of the challenges faced by parents and teachers when dealing with children with behavioral issues. Finally, the book looks at rarer and more concerning situations that may arise and how to deal with them. Rogers tackles instances of random disobedience, but this is just one of dozens of specific scenarios in these pages. About battles over bedtime, for example, she identifies multiple potential motivations; the child may view the situation as a power struggle, or they may simply be anxious. She's sympathetic to the kids involved, often asking readers to see things from their perspective. Why do children misbehave in stores, for instance? From their perspective, she asserts, shopping is boring, adults ignore you, you’re not allowed to touch anything, and “you get shut down when you try to pick something you want.” She puts forward strategies for dealing with getting children to clean their rooms or stopping a child from repeatedly interrupting others. She also addresses the “learned helplessness” of kids who always expect help and therefore never learn new and complex things on their own.
The comprehensiveness of Rogers’ advice is impressive and deeply involving, and the book as a whole makes for engrossing reading—even for those who’ve never spent a single hour around a moody, temperamental child. (Indeed, many of situation-calming techniques outlined here would work equally well with immature adults.) The author’s tactic for dramatizing virtually every scenario she puts forward—complete with simulated dialogue between caretaker and child—works with direct, unobtrusive efficiency, but the broader discussions are equally enlightening. At every turn, her breakdowns of the best approaches to tense or sticky situations is compassionate, even when she’s recommending strict responses, as in cases of children trying to manipulate adults: “By eighteen months,” Rogers writes, “every self-respecting baby can tell who in the family is the easy touch”; sometimes, she says, the way to counteract this behavior in older children is to establish that if manipulation is attempted, choices revert instantly to the worst options. Even here, Rogers offers a nuanced perspective, noting that occasionally kids are grateful for the strictest option, as it sometimes gives them an excuse for getting out of something they didn’t really want to do. This element of sympathy is at its strongest in the book’s latter sections, some of which deal with helping children to navigate their parents’ divorce, while others deal with the extremes of early teen mood swings. In every chapter, the book resonates with the author’s long experience, and readers will appreciate her calm wisdom.
A sweeping and pleasingly empathetic guide to the problems of childrearing.Pub Date: March 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798991615600
Page Count: 258
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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