Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Parenting Books That Are The Most Helpful

By Leanna Rae Scott


One very important factor of helpful parenting books is that they should be based quite a bit on the actual personal experience of the authors and not primarily on their formal education or the experience they have in giving professional advice. Formal education is always a plus, for sure, but it's not as crucial as the personal experience of the authors in researching various parenting techniques with their own children and finding out what actually works.

Also, it's important for these writers to be able to analyze why certain techniques work and why others don't. Writers who are able to do this on a personal basis need to actually raise some of their own kids. (Logically, it makes sense that writers who raise more of their own children actually have a chance of learning more than writers who have fewer children.)

Most authors of parenting books, as we parents have noticed, are physicians who tend to view their expertise in advising parents in their practices (and not necessarily their own parenting expertise) as equaling or bettering the average parent's expertise. Physicians like this, who view their own professional parenting expertise as superior to that of average, even highly experienced parents, often see themselves as experts.

Many of these professional parenting experts, for example, tell other parents, with confidence, that tantrums are a normal, natural, and highly unavoidable part of raising kids. However, thousands and perhaps millions of average parents know different from their own personal experience.

This points out a problem that expert parent advisors often have: their formal education often steers them wrong on such issues as temper-tantrum inevitability. Their university courses often give them faulty, handed-down concepts such as this from past generations of expert scholars. This is why it's so important for people who are writing parenting books to first gain a reasonable level of personal parenting experience.




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