The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart [Paperback]

Jan Hunt (Author), Peggy O'Mara (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2001

The Natural Child is the instruction manual that should have come with your child.
Derek Markham, ecoBrain

The Natural Child makes a compelling case for a return to attachment parenting, a child-rearing approach that has come naturally for parents throughout most of human history. In this insightful guide, parenting specialist Jan Hunt links together attachment parenting principles with child advocacy and homeschooling philosophies, offering a consistent approach to raising a loving, trusting, and confident child. The Natural Child dispels the myths of "tough love," building baby's self-reliance by ignoring its cries, and the necessity of spanking to enforce discipline. Instead, the book explains the value of extended breast-feeding, family co-sleeping, and minimal child-parent separation.

Homeschooling, like attachment parenting, nurtures feelings of self-worth, confidence, and trust. The author draws on respected leaders of the homeschool movement such as John Taylor Gatto and John Holt, guiding the reader through homeschool approaches that support attachment parenting principles.

Being an ally to children is spontaneous for caring adults, but intervening on behalf of a child can be awkward and surrounded by social taboo. The Natural Child shows how to stand up for a child's rights effectively and sensitively in many difficult situations.

The role of caring adults, points out Hunt, is not to give children "lessons in life"–but to employ a variation of The Golden Rule, and treat children as we would like to have been treated in childhhood.

Jan Hunt is the Director of The Natural Child Project, Coordinator of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in British Columbia, and on the Board of Directors for Attachment Parenting International. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

 

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I had grown jaded with the flood of parenting books, but The Natural Child is a rare and splendid exception." -- Joseph Chilton Pearce, Back Cover, The Natural Child

From the Author

(From the Introduction)

The Natural Child is a collection of essays on parenting and education which I wrote between 1988 and the present. The essays were written to help parents and future parents understand the critical importance of treating their children with dignity, respect, understanding, and compassion from infancy into adulthood. I hope to inspire parents toward a new way of being with their children that allows for a mutually trusting and loving relationship based on respectful, gentle guidance and emotional support.

This approach has been called “attachment parenting” or “empathic parenting”. It is often considered to be “New Age” but it is in fact, age-old. Many of the practices that I recommend in this book were the norm for thousands of generations, and have only been questioned within the last 100 years or less.

Empathic parenting, to put it most simply, is believing what we know in our heart to be true. Children raised with love and compassion will be free to use their time as adults in meaningful and creative ways, rather than expressing their childhood hurts in ways that harm themselves or others. If adults have no need to deal with the past, they can live fully in the present.

It is my belief that through empathic parenting the world can become a more peaceful and a more humane place, where every child can grow to adulthood with a generous capacity for empathy and trust. Our society has no more urgent task.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Society Publishers (December 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865714401
• ISBN-13: 978-0865714403
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 0.5 x 6.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #330,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jan Hunt, M.Sc. Counseling Psychology, is the Director of the Natural Child Project (www.naturalchild.org), a member of the Board of Directors for the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and a member of the Advisory Board for Holistic Moms Network and Attachment Parenting Intl. Her son Jason unschooled from the beginning with a learner-directed approach.

Jan is available for parenting and unschooling telephone counseling worldwide. For information visit http://www.naturalchild.org/counseling/.

PUBLISHED WORKS

The Unschooling Unmanual (The Natural Child Project, 2009)

A Gift for Baby (The Natural Child Project, 2005)

The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart (New Society, December 2001)

"Ten Reasons Not to Hit Your Kids", Appendix D in Alice Miller's Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, (New York: Dutton, 1991).

Newspaper column: The Natural Child: Parenting and Education that Respects Children, 1989-1998.

"Ten Reasons to Respond to a Crying Child", Empathic Parenting, Journal of the CSPCC, Summer 1996, pp. 7-8.

PROFESSIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS

"I consider Jan Hunt's writing as exceptionally clear, based on facts, and coming out of her own experience. Parents rarely find in the press the essential, precious information her work could give them. I very much hope that her strong voice will become more and more known in the world through her lucid, well-informed writing." - Dr. Alice Miller, author of Breaking Down the Wall of Silence and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

"Jan Hunt is a most diligent, energetic, and well-informed person with regard to children's issues. She is one of the few people who understands and can write about the real needs of children as opposed to the rationalized needs of parents in relation to their children. Moreover, she can do this in an engaging fashion that does not put parents off. For the sake of children everywhere, I hope that her Internet columns are widely read and taken to heart." - Dr. Elliott Barker, Director, Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

"Jan's writing is insightful, carefully thought out, wonderfully readable, and very useful. I wish for her writing to have as large an audience as possible. Adults all over the world need to hear the ideas she expresses so well." - Rick Lahrson, Executive Director, The Kids' Project

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Heart of Childhood February 16, 2003

By Andrea L. Sutton

Format:Paperback

The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart is refreshing, well written and full of important insight about parenthood and childhood. It's the kind of book that makes you think how different the world would be if everyone read it.
In her passionate and poignant collection of essays, Jan Hunt repeats this simple dictum often enough for it to become something of a mantra: "All children behave as well as they are treated". As mantras go, it's a pretty good one. It serves as an excellent reminder for the harried, outnumbered mother when a meltdown (hers or her child's) is imminent. It's also a bracing dose of truth for parents who have never questioned the conventional wisdom in which child rearing in our culture is mired.
This book is a marvelously validating read for anyone who has been accused of "spoiling" his or her children by responding to their cries too quickly or too frequently, favoring creative conflict resolution over punishments, or who is struggling to swim against the tide of mainstream parenting "rules".
Hunt presents a grounded, well-researched case for a return to the age-old methods of parenting that are now called "empathic" or "attachment" style. Citing sources that range from anthropologist Jean Liedloff and pediatrician Dr. William Sears to the Book of Corinthians and the European Charter of Children's Rights, Hunt addresses the challenges of raising children with respect and compassion in a society where childhood is often viewed as a noisome aberration that must be quelled at all costs.
The book contains several of Hunt's more well known essays, including "A Baby Cries: How Should Parents Respond?", "Ten Reasons to Respond to a Crying Child", and a personal favorite of mine, "Ten Ways We Misunderstand Children". Hunt is at her best in the latter, writing simply and eloquently of parents' unrealistic expectations and of the hurtful result of criticism and mistrust. "We forget what it was like to be a child and expect our children to act like adults instead of acting their age," she writes. "A healthy child will have a short attention span, and be rambunctious, noisy, and emotionally expressive." It's the kind of essay that you want to post in every pediatrician's office, portrait studio, toy store, mommy-and-me classroom, and anywhere else young children are fidgeting.
Hunt also gives, in essays such as "Ten Tips for Shopping With Children", "Ten Alternatives to Punishment", and "Intervening on Behalf of a Child in a Public Place" some concrete advice for meeting the daily challenges of supermarkets, playgrounds, and sibling rivalries. There are some helpful alternatives to the ideas and methods found in mainstream parenting magazines. Hunt gives outstanding, off-the-beaten-path sources for parenting information and excellent advice.

42 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important, Heartfelt, and Engaging Book February 2, 2002

By shantinik

Format:Paperback

If the Quaker prophet John Woolman were alive today, and contemplating parenting issues, this is the book he would have written. Hunt's thesis is simple: a happy childhood lasts forever, and every child is no less a human being than we are, and must be treated as such. Adults behave as well as they are treated, and the same holds true for children. Adults generally do not improve their behavior when they are insulted, criticized, threatened, publicly humiliated, or beaten; or in the rare instances when they do so, the costs in fearfulness, anger, and resentment are extraordinarily high.

Fortunately, argues Hunt eloquently, the seed of how to be with children is implanted within us. If we listen hard enough, the direction of how to act toward a child comes naturally. Crying, for example, is a signal provided by nature meant to disturb parents so they can seek out the causes of the child's distress.

The Natural Child offers a consistent and compelling approach to raising a loving, trusting, and confident child, without resort to coercion or manipulation, simply by following the Parenting Golden Rule: "Treat your child as you would like to be treated if you were in the same position." This book is a must for every public and church library, and the perfect gift for the individual or couple expecting the arrival of their first "distinguished visitors".

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The power of respect January 4, 2002

By Elisabeth Hallett

Format:Paperback

The subtitle of Jan Hunt's new book is "Parenting from the heart." With equal truth it could be subtitled "Parenting that respects children." How strange that such a gentle motto sounds radical... almost revolutionary. In the words of the Seneca elder Grandmother Twylah Nitsch, "In Native culture, children are regarded as teachers because they have not yet had any experience of having their truth and their trust chipped away by people who want to control them." Jan Hunt celebrates the power of trust and respect, freely extended to children from birth onwards. Her goal is nothing less than the ending of all forms of child abuse, and the creation of a world where children can grow into adulthood with their inborn capacities for love and learning still intact. Her book is friendly, practical, and filled with powerful ideas expressed in simple and direct style, well supported by evidence that these ideas really work. The Natural Child shows that "parenting from the heart" is not a burden but a joy and privilege.