Growing with Your Child - Hardcover

Schoen, Elin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385421583 ISBN 13: 9780385421584

Publisher: Doubleday, 1994

Synopsis

Offering an alternative for parents who do not want to choose between their own happiness and their children's, the author demonstrates that parents can reshape their lives by being alert to feelings, memories, and ideas created by an intense bond.

About this title

Reviews

In a warm-hearted, good-natured alternative to out-and-out instructional books about raising children, Schoen offers instead an anecdotal meditation on "how raising children changes us, our attitudes, behavior, personality, goals, our views of ourselves and the world, subtly or dramatically, consciously and unconsciously." Quoting everyone from Bruno Bettelheim to Bruce Springsteen on the "therapeutic effect" of having and/or raising children, she offers an unabashedly, unashamedly positive view of the impact of children on parents, psychologically, spiritually and otherwise. "Simply?although sometimes it's not so simple?realizing how our children can help us reach our full potential as people puts us well on the way to realizing our full potential as parents." Although at times, the book may seem too good to be true, filled with uplifting tales of parents redeemed by their kids, Schoen's cheerful and sensitive approach is hard to resist. Her accounts of transformed parents?including a wonderfully insightful look at the late writer Raymond Carver's perspective on his fatherhood?support her central argument: that "the idea that our children provide us, as they grow, with successive opportunities that we might not otherwise have had for working through conflicts dating from when we were growing up, and thereby moving on in our personal growth, is probably as close as anyone has come to formulating a real psychodynamic of parenthood."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Much of the available literature on parenting deals with how parents affect and influence their children. Schoen (Widower, LJ 9/15/84; Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy, Yale Univ.) examines the influence as it flows the other way-from child to parent. To describe the profound and wonderful changes that parenthood usually brings, she uses the literature of the field as well as her own experience and the experiences of parents she has interviewed. Schoen argues that both parents and children should grow and develop together; the parenting experience should never be thought of as an either/or option, with one holding the other back. Likewise, she cautions that parenting is not a sideline to the main business of life. For its sense of balance and affirmation, this is the kind of book one wants to recommend to all prospective and current parents and to the libraries that serve them.
John Moryl, Yeshiva Univ. Lib., New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When experienced parents warn those eagerly awaiting their first child that "your life will change," they don't always mean for the better. Considering the demands daily care, discipline, and development place on parents, rearing children is often a challenge, even a burden. Schoen explores the rewards, particularly the transformative effect parenthood has on parents in terms of their attitudes, behavior, personality, and world view--in short, how parenthood enables, indeed forces them, to grow up. Drawing on personal experience and the perceptions of other parents in all walks of life and living in Connecticut (a geographic limitation due to being a parent herself), Schoen examines the process of emotional development brought about by parenthood, the spiritual nature of childhood, how parenthood heals parents, its beneficent influence on creative expression, and its impact on work skills, personal growth, self-esteem, and marriage. Reflective, insightful, and fascinating, Schoen's exploration of the fundamental ways parenthood enriches parents' lives discloses the essence underlying the many challenges and burdens of child rearing. Kathryn Carpenter

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385421583
• ISBN 13: 9780385421584
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1