This is when a parent shrinks back and wonders: Why am I outsourcing my most important job to a paperback? Eventually, the authors let their bias show. The psychologists prescribe innovative therapeutic solutions the learning specialists recommend new-fangled mental calisthenics. It’s not that they are so inherently bad - it’s just that they all seem to have an ax to grind that says a heck of a lot more about the authors’ desire for a really cool ax (or their own professional biases) than the many nuances of real-life parenting. Thus, like many parents I know, I’ve read parts of dozens of these tracts on raising happier, smarter, more responsible children, but finished precious few. “You don’t even know them.”Įventually, the curious, more gullible me wins out, and I crack open the cover only to come across the first patently inane assertion and drop the book mid-sentence, never to be picked up again. “You can’t fool me with your bogus generalizations about my children,” I silently critique the grinning author on the back flap. Easily Unimpressed - smells a rat and turns up her nose. While my “eager-beaver, wanna be a better mommy” personality yearns to devour these ubiquitous how-to manuals, the other side of me - call her Ms. Call me unbalanced, but parenting books exert a schizoid power over my brain.
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