Love: Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves
Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves is a great book about parenting. The author, Naomi Aldort, stresses the need to validate your children’s feelings and let them work through them on their own, instead of the more common method of trying to distract them from their feelings. She emphasizes that our children should not have to always act in accordance with our needs. If it is not unsafe or hurting anyone, why not let them climb those rocks and get filthy? Or even go so far as act out their power struggles on you. Additionally, she helps parents consider ways to give their children more autonomy. All of this felt really intuitive to me and I appreciated her advice. However, there is a catch.Most likely, we were not raised this way, and all the baggage that we carry from our parents, we tend to pass on unconsciously to our own children. This book was a bit depressing for this reason because I was forced to consider my own sense of powerlessness as a child and how it affected me as an adult. Sometimes, it was quite theraputic, other times, it made me want to go into therapy.
All advice should be taken in moderation. I felt that her methods would not work with ALL circumstances, but when I can apply them to my parenting, I do. For example, when my daughter gets upset, I now say, “Are you sad that mommy couldn’t pick you up?” and she replies, “Yes, ” and after a little talk, she gets over it. It works better than any popsicle or song.
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