Easy-to-assimilate lessons on creating a healthy and respectful relationship with your child.
How to avoid making the same mistakes as your parents.
When many of us become parents, we vow to raise our children differently than we were raised. Far too often, however, we fall back on automatic responses to our children that actually correlate to how we were raised, whether it’s a positive or negative response. David-Weill (The Suitors, 2013, etc.) takes a close look at how our unconscious actions, what we might call parental instincts, are actually reproductions of our own parents’ behavior and how we must consciously regulate and evaluate our reactions if we truly seek to take a different approach to parenting. Throughout the text, the author includes numerous examples to illustrate the wide range of ways we follow what we learned as children, whether it’s choosing a bedtime, deciding what foods to serve, or disciplining rambunctious children in the back seat of a car. She also addresses more intriguing topics, such as why we can resent having to raise our children, the amount of time we should devote to our children so they ultimately gain independence, and how squabbling over minor issues can be a way to hide from larger, more urgent issues—depression, drug use, etc. At the end of the book, a comprehensive “Practical Guide” provides parents with advice on the do’s and don’ts they can follow so they don’t become their parents as well as a series of questions that evaluate the type of parent they really are. Much of what David-Weill discusses is straightforward and common sense, but having it compiled into a logically progressive text that identifies the key ways we mimic our parents and then provides helpful ways to work around these issues makes this book a worthy read for parents of children of all ages.
Easy-to-assimilate lessons on creating a healthy and respectful relationship with your child.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-056-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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