The Whole Parenting Guide: Strategies, Resources and Inspiring Stories for Holistic Parenting and Family Living - Softcover

Reder, Alan; Catalfo, Phil; Hamilton, Stephanie Renfrow

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767901339 ISBN 13: 9780767901338

Publisher: Broadway, 1999

Synopsis

A complete, holistic guide to:

Pregnancy, birth, and infancy
Fostering family values
Nutrition and wellness
Learning, play, and creativity
Environmentalism
Community-building
Money matters
Spirituality

At last, here is a practical and inspiring guide to holistic parenting written for all parents who want to promote the growth and well-being of their children's minds, bodies, and spirits while improving their communities and the planet as a whole. The Whole Parenting Guide is the first parenting book to comprehensively explore and integrate the physical, mental, spiritual, and social tasks of childrearing. Featuring profiles of families involved in a variety of progressive parenting approaches, photographs and illustrations, and extensive source listings of publications, products, online sites, and organizations, The Whole Parenting Guide will enrich and instruct families for years to come.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Reder has written about family issues for numerous publications, including New Age Journal, as well as two books on socially responsible business. Phil Catalfo, family editor for The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog and senior editor for Yoga Journal, is the author of Raising Spiritual Children in a Material World. Award-winning journalist Stephanie Renfrow Hamilton, a former senior editor at Parenting magazine and a former editor at Essence, monitors the media for the nonprofit organization News Watch.

From the Inside Flap

holistic guide to:

Pregnancy, birth, and infancy
Fostering family values
Nutrition and wellness
Learning, play, and creativity
Environmentalism
Community-building
Money matters
Spirituality

At last, here is a practical and inspiring guide to holistic parenting written for all parents who want to promote the growth and well-being of their children's minds, bodies, and spirits while improving their communities and the planet as a whole. The Whole Parenting Guide is the first parenting book to comprehensively explore and integrate the physical, mental, spiritual, and social tasks of childrearing. Featuring profiles of families involved in a variety of progressive parenting approaches, photographs and illustrations, and extensive source listings of publications, products, online sites, and organizations, The Whole Parenting Guide will enrich and instruct families for years to come.

Reviews

The authors, all parents as well as editors and writers specializing in family issues, aim to help parents do their job better. They deal with everything from pregnancy to toys, diet, play, and investing for college. Their text stands out from the field because of its holistic approach; for example, in discussing wellness they include information on alternative physicians and organic foods. There are sections on alternative schools and home schooling, recycling, volunteering, and socially responsible consuming. There is more background information here than similar texts provide, and the inclusion of actual family stories makes it all the more interesting. Libraries with parenting texts would do well to include this alternative approach.AJohn Moryl, Yeshiva Univ. Lib., New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Whole Parenting Approach to Family Life

Two beings join; cells unite; in time, a life begins. From that same process, driven by the irresistible urge of life itself, comes not just the individual but also the family, the tribe, the community; in other forms of life, the pack, the school, the grove; ultimately, from this simple but unfathomable process, repeated endlessly, comes the planet.

Looked at this way, we can see the birth of a child and the life of a family as John Muir did when he pondered the natural world and found that "[w]hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." For children aren't born and raised in a vacuum; families live in communities; they depend on the air and soil and water not just where they live but where their food is grown; every day, families make choices that affect far-off people and communities and species, just as distant decisions affect them.

In the following chapters, we promote an integrated view of the world and the family's place in it. All parents are interested in protecting the well-being of their children. But it is not always easy to recognize all the ways that the life we make with our family--including the activities we pursue, the things we consume, and the ways we spend our money--either enhance or detract from that well-being.

Not that any parents, the authors included, want to be told what they should be doing, no matter how virtuous. But we do assume that your interest in the parenting approaches described in this book means that you are unusually interested in what's best for your children--that in your life, kids come first.

In wanting the "highest possible good" for our kids, most of us would include the following: We want their minds to develop into rich expressions of intelligence, curiosity, and creativity. We want their bodies to be models of health and vigor. We also want our children to become good people, able to negotiate their way through the moral quagmires and cheap entertainments of modern culture without becoming cynical or violent. We want their hearts to be strong and their souls intact. We want what is uniquely best for each of our children, as well, rather than having them just settle for what society hands them in the way of food, education, recreation, and so on. We want our children to be individuals, too; we know we can't insulate them from mass culture but we don't want them to disappear into it either. Finally, we want our children to realize that some of the most meaningful aspects of life--love, a sense of their place in a larger scheme--are not things they can simply purchase or possess or even put their hands on.

At the end of the day, we want to come away with a clear conscience that we did our best for our kids and the world they are inheriting. Herein, we offer you our best information on how to do just that.

We believe that a family that sees itself squarely in the grand scheme of things stands a better chance of being a happy, fulfilled family than one that doesn't. We also believe that there are many ways for you and your family to embody this outlook and that the path there is exciting and scenic. We invite you onto that path, not because we have found out everything there is to know about the landscape, but because we find the journey so rewarding.

Before we embark on that journey together, some background is in order. It took a unique combination of historical circumstances to create the predicament of the modern family. Those same circumstances prompted dramatic insights and strategies that have helped many families not only cope with this predicament but thrive in the face of it. By understanding how parenting has changed in the last few generations, you will better understand the options you face today and which of them might be a better fit both for your family and the times.

The Whole Parenting Story

Beyond the radar of the media and an army of social critics, family life is transforming for the better for millions of American parents and children. Not that these Americans are immune from trends that stress and sometimes break apart families, but they more actively resist them. In these homes, Mom and Dad strive to be highly involved with their kids even though social and economic forces pull them in the opposite direction. They examine what mainstream society hands down as received parenting wisdom, including what their parents did with them, with a critical eye. They reject much of what corporate America and the healthcare establishment markets to them and their children. They stack their nightstands with books and articles on parenting, studying the subject as diligently as if they were back in school. They welcome the unconventional, as long as it works.

In so doing, these parents have reclaimed much of what previous generations had abandoned as primitive and unscientific--natural birthing, breast-feeding, natural healthcare, and holistic nutrition. They have challenged institutions such as public education with progressive alternatives of their own such as Waldorf schools and homeschooling. They have decried the consumerism and commercialism of American society and warn their children about its excesses. They talk about voluntary simplicity, and many of them are actually practicing it. Their efforts to transform family life don't always succeed, but many times they do, and the result is some truly remarkable kids--healthy, smart, curious, self-assured, and independent thinking.

We call this constellation of parenting approaches Whole Parenting. Ultimately, Whole Parenting is the family version of a set of values shared by a large and growing segment of the population. It encompasses holistic health, an interest in personal growth and caring relationships, a deep and more personal spirituality, a mystical appreciation of nature, environmental stewardship, a social conscience, an appreciation of different cultures, a rejection of the dominant culture's materialism, and, in its adherents' own holistic and progressive way, strong family values. Not everyone who practices Whole Parenting resides in all of these camps, but everyone who practices Whole Parenting resides in at least several of them.

As a cohesive approach to family life, Whole Parenting came together rather suddenly in the early 1970s, although threads appeared earlier. A movement without a leader or spokesperson, it encompasses millions of parents who want the best for their kids, who oppose the mainstream version of what that means, and who have enough people- and buying power to leave a large and visible stamp on the culture.

Childbirth and Infant Care--The Evolution of a Revolution

Some might guess that the roots of Whole Parenting go no deeper than the 1960s and 1970s counterculture having children of their own in their own distinctive style. But Whole Parenting is not just the imprint of a generation. Lava lamps and bell-bottoms have come and gone. The oldest boomers are now wistfully cuddling grandkids, their own child-raising years far behind them. Yet Whole Parenting remains deeply ingrained in the culture, the preferred parenting approach for vast numbers of young parents with not one nostalgic thought about John, Paul, George, Ringo, Aretha, or Jimi.

In part, Whole Parenting came about because certain pendulums in society had swung so far in one direction that there was nowhere for them to swing but back. Take, for example, the evolution of current birthing practices. Before 1900, most women gave birth at home with another woman, often a professional midwife, assisting. Midwives put their faith in nature's wisdom and waited for her to deliver the child. A fair number of women died in childbirth in those days. As a result, women dreaded giving birth, and their dread dramatically increased the pain, although the connection between fear and discomfort wasn't understood at the time.

By the turn of the century, physicians had convinced educated, upper-class women that they could make birthing faster and safer. In came a mechanized birthing procedure that featured forceps, episiotomy (surgical enlargement of the vaginal opening), and women lying on their backs for the convenience of the doctors, most of them men. Out went any attention to mother and baby's thoughts and emotions, not to mention any idea that nature's way might still have something to offer.

Doctor-assisted birthing had spread to the general population by the 1940s; most women were now having their babies in gleaming, sterile hospitals rather than their own bedrooms. Maternal and newborn death rates dropped sharply, in part from doctors' efforts and in part because improved family nutrition put mothers in better shape to give birth. Physicians also answered women's pleas to do something about the pain--with a cocktail of numbing drugs.

In infant nutrition and child care, nature was also taking a backseat to the wonders of science. Since mothers no longer trusted themselves to give birth without a doctor at hand, they began to see physicians as experts on virtually every aspect of child-rearing. They were developing a similar faith in science and technology in general, which put electric refrigerators in their kitchens, radios in their living rooms, and cars in their garages. When moms began asking their doctors the best way to feed their babies, the professionals gave them the scientific and technological answer they wanted to hear--canned baby formula. Most physicians believed formula was just as good as mother's milk and some believed it was superior.

The behavioral advice doctors were giving their patients also favored bottle-feeding. Since the turn of the century, doctors and psychologists had been suggesting putting infants on rigid feeding and sleeping schedules to prevent parents from "spoiling" the child. Women who used bottles found it easier to resist their babies' cries, both physically and emotionally, because breasts are biologically programmed to respond to b...

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0767901339
• ISBN 13: 9780767901338
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448