Solid, logical tips for readers to be better parents than their own parents.
A veteran London-based psychotherapist uses her training and numerous case studies to formulate advice on how to develop strong and lasting relationships with your children.
“I take the long-term view on parenting rather than a tips-and-tricks approach,” writes Perry (How To Stay Sane, 2012, etc.). “I am interested in how we can relate to our children rather than how we can manipulate them….This book is for parents who not only love their children but want to like them too.” At the beginning, the author asks readers to examine their own childhoods—the good, bad, and everything in-between—and assess what made them feel safe, nurtured, and loved unconditionally. If one did not have a childhood that fostered these positive emotions, as many have not, then she suggests that the emotional discomfort one feels is the clue to what not to do with your own child. By identifying these difficulties, one is more readily able to do the opposite and nurture positive feelings in your child. Perry looks at pregnancy and the first few months of life with a newborn, noting how the months prior to birth and immediately after create significant changes in a parent’s life as they assume one of life’s greatest responsibilities. The author encourages parents to talk to and engage with their child as soon as they can, accepting them as a fully aware person and not someone to talk down to or ignore by constantly being on the phone or by using electronic devices to entertain them. Her common-sense advice is backed by research and case studies as well as a variety of exercises for parents, including one about “how to predict difficulties.” Although Perry’s theories are hardly groundbreaking, the presentation of the information is friendly, accessible, and candid, making it easy to digest and act on.
Solid, logical tips for readers to be better parents than their own parents.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984879-55-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An East German psychotherapist explores, in an occasionally affecting way, the experience of living within a totalitarian system. It was a system in which a citizen had to guard his utterances not only outside but inside the home, because parents could not speak too freely in front of children, who might themselves be indiscreet or inadvertently betray them. The individual was required not merely to conform but to show enthusiasm for the system. It was not possible, Maaz writes, ``to escape this personality deformation.'' The East German system used overt force, including torture and arrest, as well as the indirect force of legal insecurity, reprisals, intimidation, indoctrination, and fear. It required one to ``sacrifice emotional spontaneity, all frankness and honesty, as well as [one's] critical faculty,'' even to preserve a ``relatively safe life of subservience.'' Few were able to resist the pressure. Millions participated regularly in huge ``jubilation marches,'' and an estimated half a million citizens were informants of the Stasi, the secret police. It was little wonder that the capacity for independent thought and action became increasingly rare. In describing this process, Maaz is persuasive and, in a book published originally in 1990 in Germany, prescient regarding the difficulties that East Germans would face in adjusting to democracy. When dealing with the more theoretical foundations of a controlled psychological environment he is less convincing, as when he complains about the authoritarian technique of ``forcing children to sit on the potty''; he is even self- contradictory when, discussing his therapeutic work with patients, he describes the act of emigration from East Germany as a ``sadomasochistic defense of their dammed-up aggression.'' And when he fears for a new economic expansion that will ``exacerbate the ecological crisis'' and ``step up the armaments business,'' he is venturing beyond his area of expertise. Like the curate's egg, good in parts.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03364-3
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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