Nurture the Nature: Understanding and Supporting Your Child's Unique Core Personality - Hardcover

Gurian, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078798633X ISBN 13: 9780787986339

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2007

Synopsis

From Michael Gurian, the best-selling author of The Minds of Boys and The Wonder of Girls, comes the next-step book that shows how any parent can tune into a child’s unique core personality, hard wiring, temperament, and genetic predisposition in order to help that child flourish and thrive.

Based on the most recent brain research, Nurture the Nature features the Ten Tips for Nurturing the Nature of Your Baby, self-tests, checklists, and many other tools for you to help your kids get exactly the kind of support they need, from infants to adolescents.

While offering positive ideas for nurturing your child, Gurian also shows how to avoid the stress, pressures, and excessive competition of what he identifies as social trends parenting. Most parents know instinctively that their child is unique and has special potential, weaknesses, and strengths. No child is a blank slate. Gurian calls on parents to turn away from one-size-fits-all approaches and instead support the individual core nature of a child with effective and customized loving care.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Gurian is a family therapist and The New York Times best-selling author of The Wonder of Boys, The Wonder of Girls, The Good Son, Boys and Girls Learn Differently! and The Minds of Boys, among many others. He is cofounder of the Gurian Institute and a pioneer in the fields of family development, education, and gender studies. He has appeared on Today, Good Morning America, CNN, NPR, and in The New York Times, USA Today, Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere.

From the Back Cover

"As scientifically sound as it is humane."
—Harold S. Koplewicz, M.D., chairman, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, and founder and director, New York University Child Study Center

"Nurture the Nature is thorough, thoughtful, accurate, and brilliant. The science is sound and well researched."
—Daniel Amen, M.D., author, Making a Good Brain Great

"Michael Gurian has once again produced a magnificent book on children, this one showing us how to appreciate and indeed capitalize on the unique nature within each child. Nurture the Nature should be mandatory reading for parents who want their children to mature into happy, healthy human beings—which is of course all of us!"
—Dr. Tracey J. Shors, Department of Psychology, Center for Collaborative Neuroscience, Rutgers University

"Nurture the Nature is up-to-the-minute, filled with wisdom, and an intensely moral book, concerned with helping a child develop a sense of purpose in life, and promoting self-reliance and self-discipline in children. Both as a mother and a psychologist, I could not put this book down!"
—Judith Kleinfeld, professor of psychology, University of Alaska, and national director of The Boys Project

"As a parent myself, I believe one of the greatest challenges to parenting well is to see who your individual child really is. Nurture the Nature gives parents the ability to do just that—and to understand?the complex issues that shape our children today."
—Rosalind Wiseman, author, Queen Bees and Wannabes

"A wealth of practical advice on how to escape the competitive pressure of social trends parenting and instead nurture the core nature of your child."
—Michele Borba, Ed.D., author, 12 Simple Secrets Real Moms Know and Building Moral Intelligence

From the Inside Flap

"Your child's core nature is thrilling to observe and appreciate as it unfolds before your eyes. It's wonderful to feel confident as a parent, to tailor parenting techniques to fit the unique needs of your child's nature."
—From the Introduction

From Michael Gurian, the best-selling author of The Minds of Boys and The Wonder of Girls, comes the next-step book that shows how any parent can tune into a child's unique core personality, hard wiring, temperament, and genetic predisposition in order to help that child flourish and thrive.

Based on the most recent brain research, Nurture the Nature features the Ten Tips for Nurturing the Nature of Your Baby, self-tests, checklists, and many other tools for you to help your kids get exactly the kind of support they need, from infants to adolescents.

While offering positive ideas for nurturing your child, Gurian also shows how to avoid the stress, pressures, and excessive competition of what he identifies as social trends parenting. Most parents know instinctively that their child is unique and has special potential, weaknesses, and strengths. No child is a blank slate. Gurian calls on parents to turn away from one-size-fits-all approaches and instead support the individual core nature of a child with effective and customized loving care.

Nurture the Nature offers a rare combination of solid research and compelling case history that will help you develop the consistency and confidence you need for parenting your children in a way that respects who they really are.

Reviews

Family therapist Gurian (The Wonder of Girls) approaches his nature-based theme from a slightly different angle in his latest work, urging parents to buck "social trends parenting" and make decisions based on the core personality of their individual child. A researcher of brain science and gender differences, Gurian believes that much of a child's behavior is inborn from the start. But Gurian sees a disturbing trend in parents' increasing willingness to disregard their own instincts, letting media and society-driven fads dictate the way they raise their kids. In his own "clinical detective work," he has found that children are becoming bogged down by activity overload and the "material anxiety" that arises from trying to keep up with the latest designer fads or electronic gadgets. Gurian presents an in-depth, chapter-by-chapter analysis of child development, beginning at infancy and ending in early adulthood. Gurian's presentation is comprehensive and peppered with fascinating facts (i.e., how pheromones of biological fathers affect the onset of girls' puberty or how parts of a toddler's brain actually swell during a tantrum). The author's new text will help parents begin, in the tradition of Maria Montessori, to "follow the child," rather than adapt their kids to a contemporary one-size-fits-all mold. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Scoffing at fads in parenting, Gurian, family therapist and author of The Wonder of Boys (1996) and The Wonder of Girls (2002), encourages parents to fine-tune their child rearing to the unique personalities of their children. Each child has a core nature, or temperament, that parents should heed when deciding on discipline, nurturing, education, activities, and the myriad other decisions that go into parenting. He urges parents to resist "social trends parenting," which is contradictory, confusing, and mass-marketed. He details 10 myths of social trends, including that experts know more about children than parents, children are born as blank slates and parents are responsible for engraving the slates, and children's lives must be regulated with lessons and activities. Gurian uses case studies and offers specific advice for parents to address issues from eating disorders to misbehavior to school performance at each stage of a child's development, taking into account a child's unique personality. Sound advice for parents who want to avoid cookie-cutter approaches. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 078798633X
• ISBN 13: 9780787986339
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368