Customer Reviews

The Best Things Parents Do: Ideas & Insights from Real-World Parents

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is so refreshing to me as a mother. So often, my parenting books leave me feeling less than perfect, even guilty about what I'm not doing as a parent. Not this one. The Best Thing Parents Do is a supportive and helpful guide to finding your way through the thicket of parenting. It's terrific.

I was expecting this book just to be a cheerleading pat-on-the-back for parents who mess up or are merely well-intentioned but it offers incredible real-world advice on how to be a better parent. For example, the observations give guidance on how to handle squabbling siblings in the back seat of the car, etc. Unlike other books that focus just on toddler or just on teens, I found the advice useful for all ages. I've been giving this as a gift to many of my parent friends and with Mother's Day coming...

Written by Susan Isaacs Kohl (a preschool director, teacher, parent eduator, and single parent of 30 years' experience), The Best Things Parents Do: You're Doing A Better Job Than You Think You Are is an uplifting self-help guide to nurturing self-sufficiency, high expectations, optimism, and emotional well-being in oneself and one's children. Positive, uplifting chapters guide the reader through means to reinforce family connections and sharing. An upbeat self-help guide filled with positive, can-do advice.

I love this book. There is so much self-help literature available today...how to lose weight, how to be a better parent, how to get rich, organized, smart, etc. Practically every parenting book one looks at offers advice, sound or otherwise. "The Best Things Parents Do" is unique in its approach. Through a series of vignettes and stories gleaned from her considerable experience as a parent, preschool teacher and director, Ms. Kohl provides examples of real life parents finding creative, loving ways to handle real life challenges with their children.
Kohl writes, "What a privilege it is to be the person in a child's life who looks past his weaknesses to see the gifts that will become the gateways for new development." This is exactly what she does for parents! How refreshing! A "must read."

I loved this book and found it very helpful. The title caught my eye and I thought, "Now I'll get some ideas from some really good parents". What I found were incredible stories about regular, everyday parents. These parents were experimenting, learning, and trying, to help their children grow in joyful and healthy ways. Their stories are easy to understand and inspired me to try some of their ideas and approaches, modified to fit my own situation. The author, Susan Isaacs Kohl, places each story in the larger context of what the parent is conveying or teaching the child. Like many of us, these parents may not have been aware of the larger picture. They were just getting through a challenging situation as best they could. Having finished the book, the small steps, and the larger picture, are both more available to me in my daily parenting. Definitely a good book!

This excellent book presents many examples of ordinary parents who found techniques that work with their children. You can decide which techniques are applicable to your own situation and try them out with your kids, or if you are not a parent, you can apply these techniques to important youngsters in your life. One of the examples tells about a four-year-old boy whose temper tantrums became worse when his parents followed the common advice of ignoring him. Noticing him without giving in to his demands helped. The last two chapters are about parents taking care of themselves and parents helping other parents.
Kohl stresses the importance of readers giving themselves credit for the good things they do as parents and of recognizing what other parents are doing that works. By doing more of what they do well and by observing how other parents handle difficult situations, parents can improve their parenting techniques. Suggested activities for parents help readers apply the concepts presented in this book. One such activity consists of rephrasing descriptions of one's child, such as "determined" and "persevering" rather than "stubborn."
I like this book because it promotes self-esteem for parents, as well as for their children, and because it provides many anecdotal examples of parents working out problems rather than a list of dos and don'ts. Another thing that I like about this book is the wide variety of examples. Having raised three children and having worked for almost forty years with parents and children--including parent counseling, teaching parents, and teaching and directing a preschool--the author bases her information on real-life, practical experience.

This is a very helpful book. If you are doing the things the author notes then it serves as validation for your efforts, if not then it is helpful in giving useful ideas to improve your relationship with your children and improve their sense of well-being.

There was nothing in here that even closely resembled that someone had "thought through" what they were saying. It was just normal thinking and nothing new.