Your Competent Child: Toward New Basic Values for the Family - Softcover

Juul, Jesper

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374527903 ISBN 13: 9780374527907

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Synopsis

A compelling and revolutionary approach to parenting and family dynamics.

In this important book, Jesper Juul argues that today's families are at an exciting crossroads. The destructive values that governed traditional hierarchical, authoritarian families are being transformed. Instead we can choose to embrace a new set of values based on the assumption that families must be built not on authoritarian force or democratic tyranny but on dignity and reciprocity between parent and child. Children are emotionally competent -- that is, they always tell the truth about how they are feeling. Parents must begin to listen to and learn from the honest feedback they receive from their children. When we feel unhappy or dissatisfied with a situation in the family, it is almost always because we were unable to convert our loving feelings into loving behavior. To do so, we need to become fluent in what Juul calls "personal language" -- a language less concerned with "shoulds" than with our own emotional honesty.

Using examples from families in many different countries, Juul has written a book that challenges parents to see the years with their children as an exciting time of growth and development for the whole family.

About this title

About the Author:

Jesper Juul, born in Denmark in 1948, is a family therapist. He is the director of the Kempler Institute of Scandinavia, a center for family therapy, and the Family Institute International in Croatia. He divides his time between Copenhagen and Zagreb.

From Publishers Weekly:

"We often think and act as if our relationship with children is a one-way street on which the traffic flows from us to them," notes Danish family therapist Juul, who champions a brave new family dynamic in this thoughtful multicultural and multinational analysis. From birth, he contends, children are "fully humanDthat is, they are social, responsive, and empathic," and over the past 30 years, in particular, they have become "less fearful and respectful of authority." Far from interpreting this trend as a breakdown in traditional values, however, Juul sees it as a healthy progression. Tracing the evolution of the family from the totalitarian power structure that has been in place for centuries toward what he calls the "post-democratic family," in which each individual is taken seriously and "the quality of decision making is accorded more importance than the decision itself," Juul sees humanity at a crossroads. He describes a new structure that is less about power struggles and violence ("an insult to any person's integrityDincluding children's") and more about dialogue and the responsible use of power, as well as about a core concept of "equal dignity." Although the book is more of a social analysis, Juul's helpful ideas and guidelines for parents make for an inspiring how-to manual for anyone interested in creating families "in which every individual can grow and prosper." Placed along with other parenting titles, this book will find an empathetic readership. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0374527903
• ISBN 13: 9780374527907
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256