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The Good Enough Parent
- How to Raise Contented, Interesting, and Resilient Children
- Narrated by: Sonya Cullingford
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
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The Good Enough Parent
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Summary
A parenting guide providing compassionate instruction and insight into raising a resilient, well-balanced child.
Bringing up a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life’s great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck.
The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of life lessons, including how to say ‘no’ to a child you adore, how to look beneath the surface of ‘bad’ behavior to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence.
Most importantly, this is a book that knows that perfection is not required - and could indeed be dangerous, because a key job of any parent is to induct a child gently into the imperfect nature of everything. Written in a tone that is encouraging, wry, and soaked in years of experience, The Good Enough Parent is an intelligent guide to raising a child who will one day look back on their childhood with just the right mixture of gratitude, humor, and love.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- James Baldock
- 16-01-24
Research based, no shame resource
I have a short attention span and have found this book quite easy to follow. It has examples in the form of quirky history and ‘what if’ scenarios and all is backed by research. There is so much in here, I would need to listen to it several times to learn it all. BUT the overall message is quite clear throughout and is reassuring for all parents and caregivers. No shame in this book. Try it 🤩
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Dominic
- 26-04-24
Incredibly well done
Such a thoughtful and surprisingly detailed and actionable book. If you’ve read a good handful of books on the topic this book might just be the only one you’ll ever need to top the list and end your search for “how to be a better” or “good enough parent”
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Jessica
- 29-11-23
Reassuring Insights Into Parenting
This felt like a big hug to my inner child.
There were lots of insightful examples and information. I now feel more reassured that i am doing a good enough job as a parent. I now see the world of parenthood a little differently and i feel i can be kinder to myself for having my own flaws and feel more “normal”. Fantastic Book.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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- CM
- 28-06-24
Ugg! It says true things but its also states rubbish
want so hard to like this book - i feel an education in / emersion in careful caring ideas to aid parents is a valuable thing but this book feels like its written by someone who actually dose not have kids. Also i hate the intro!!!
I disagree with the intro for several reasons - firstly although i love to read and learn about parenting and parenthood i do not believe there should be a total surrender to the expert over the parent when it comes to instinctive knowledge (and also it seems to put all instincts in the same camp of being bad coveniantly forgetting that a lot of what is “traditional” parenting is the popularised, messed up thinking of prior “scientific” 19th and early 20th century child expert figures.) To look at the wests lack of family supported, undervalued child phobic society and think hu yep defo the problems with the parents and this means there should be less parents having children (hello demographic time-bomb apart from anything else?!? ) is to go at this backwards. Yes there will be a few people who are unsuited - we would not advise a serial dog fighter to take up showing dogs but this book is both stupidly pessimistic and patronising to think that most people are incapable of having a child without ruining them for life. Also children are actually very tough! I do not want a child to go through horrors and there will need to be love and support for all children but how dare they sujest if your child hood was not good from 0-5 you are on the scrap heap! It can give you a perspective on what it is like to face things that are not perfect and that can be your gift to your own child when you have them - love and patience when it was not given to you because you know its value. Also i am not “renting out” my child like a museum exhibit?!? And i am no nun! And if horror of horrors this mainly childless world is to come to pass then you better b*** give the parents all the support that they need and the care they require. I think the world is already set up for the childless so perhaps the narrative instead should be we need all the childless people to stop being so gd selfish and set up society for children not say “ah there goes the parent - what a marta. Let me rent out Jonny for a day of festivity’s at the beach” from this stupid intro we go onto a stupid first sentence of the first paragraph a long the lines of a baby dose not know what it needs. WTF yes they do they know they need love, food, security and care. Any baby will loudly tell you what they need - its just they can not form words. Its not rocket sciance. Yes they will need help with guiding there way to expressing needs in socially acceptable ways and yes we should not think babies and even young children are capable of reflective deeply with complex overlapping ambivalent thoughts (that way risks considering a child is doing things out of malice when they are only doing so out of inexperience) but ugg this book - also did no one think when stating smugly that 2 year olds have not learnt that they are not yet the center of the world that this might be a very vital survival strategy to keep articulating for your rights when to all intents and purposes if you do not and someone forgets about you you would die?!?
Also to return for a second to the intro - 1) the main reason that people had children (and to the extent that they and i agree it was not 100% a chosen thing for most people) was Drumm role please lack of contraception!!!! And the death of children, so casually and implicitly lumped on the heads of historical parents vagaries and lack of care, is a gross insult to heartbroken parents from accent timeswho lost children to all manner of diseases outwith their control. Instead of seeing the lack of naming until one as a lack of value seeing it as a heartbreaking coping strategy is equally plausible and lest we think we know what people in the past thought about their children young or old then recall that there are significant historical gaps in writing and writing by powerful elite men or childless monks might not be the most helpful guide to full range of motives for hoping for pr managing children. Also that children were taught to obey and not question is not a radical failing of parents towards their children but, to the extent that such beautiful sweeping statements are true then i feel i can say one of my own and that was that society as a whole was told not to question and to obey - a fault of society as a whole not of parents in particular.
It then goes on to say stuff. Meh its got a distinctly psycoanylitical bent to its reading of the world but there are some interesting points BUT one little illustration of why i just do not get on with it
“A 9 year old girl can not understand how humiliating her 6 year old brother physically might be a bad idea because it might make him difficult for him to relate to women when he is older” wtf- i will leave you to take a moment to unpack why that is so stupid as a statement and a bloody awful reason to put forward as one to stop the physical humiliation of one person by another.
We are not week as adults and we do need to say we know better but our children deserve, when we hold our boundary, to know why (and if this is our reason provided i hope any daughter of my would call bull on me!!!)
Having slogged your way to the end of my disjointed review just as i slogged through this book i will say i returned it full of regret that the gems were so obviously covered in rubbish. Not a book for those who are beginning their parenting reading despite some of the useful blips along the way. Lock up your child’s evil with manners please?!?
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