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 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
A courageous, often profound, and extraordinary attempt by one of England's best historians to cut through the pessimism and parochialism of the profession and to find the bonds of humanity underlying its conventional divisions. Zeldin (History/Oxford Univ.; The French, 1983, etc.) ranges with prodigious learning over different civilizations and epochs, dealing with subjects as disparate as why men and women find it difficult to talk to one another and why political scientists have misunderstood the animal kingdom. His method is anything but academic: He starts most chapters with an interview or description of a person, usually French and usually a woman (``because many women seem to me to be looking at life with fresh eyes'') before broadening the discussion to analyze the nature of the concerns expressed, their historical origins, and the ways in which different civilizations have dealt with them. In doing so, he raises some questions shunned by the academic world and asks others more likely to be raised in magazines and self-help books: ``Is it inevitable,'' he asks, ``that as women become increasingly adventurous and have ever higher expectations of life, they will find men less and less adequate?'' Why are humans ``still so awkward...with even 40 per cent of Americans...complaining that they are too shy to speak freely?'' In answering questions like this, he repeatedly produces the unusual fact or the revisionist view: Writing of Islamic societies, for instance, he notes that sociability, not war, is considered the defining element of the good life. Ultimately, this is a call for a sense of the richness of life and for optimism, which he defines as ``awareness that despite nastiness and stupidity, there is something else too. Pessimism is resignation, an inability to find a way out.'' Not always as skeptical as he might be (Stalin and Hitler, he says, ``remained desperately hungry for respect''), but no short review can do justice to the richness, humor, humanity, and range of this important book.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017160-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
