ON ""HOW DO YOUR CHILDREN GROW?"": A Dialogue with Parents

Envision Eda LeShan as empathic talk jockey to a group of eager, questioning moms and dads puzzling over the perils of parenthood and the problems of infancyhood on up through putzhood and you will get the picture -- perhaps you already have via NET-TV where these taped dialogues recently formed a popular series. A helpful guidance counselor type, Mrs. LeShan is a kind of Dear Abby with sense and sensibility whose previous books (How to Survive Parenthood, 1965; The Conspiracy Against Childhood, 1967; Sex and Your Teenager, 1969) catered to a responsive middle-class constituency as does this newest one. ""LeS"" (as she appears here) warns that there are no conclusive answers to many of the questions explored which range from the pros-and-cons of breast feeding and the spank-or-not-to-spank dilemma to induced guilt as a child rearing technique and the complexities of teen rebellion against parental authority; and she adamantly eschews a formulistic approach (""If it's recipes you want, please read Julia Child!""). And although the seemingly artless and occasionally aimless discussion often appears to belie Mrs. LeShan's sophisticated knowledge of child and parent behavior, there's quasi-conventional wisdom secreted in among the Q&A: ""How lovely, this wish to please. . . . But we should modify our dreams when it reaches the point where a child is selling out his own soul in order to be pleasing, in order to be loved.