Whole Child, Whole Parent (Paperback)

by Polly Berrien Berends (Author), M. Scott Peck (Foreword) "Marrying and having a baby are part of our idea of fulfilling ourselves and becoming whole.""..." (more)
Key Phrases: freeing parent, nursing parent, sailor dog, Additional Reflection, Random House, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
For more than two decades, Whole Child/Whole Parent, the first spiritually oriented book on parenthood and the first to address the value of parenthood for the parent as well as for the child, has provided a sound, practical, psychological and spiritual footing for parenthood and family life. This fourth edition includes new material for contemporary parents on anger, children's dreams, maintaining individual and family life, marital as well as parental life, and many new personal anecdotes.

It is the perfect guide "not merely for parents who want to raise their children in the best manner possible, it is for all people, including adults who want to raise themselves." (M. Scott Peck, from the foreword).

Whether exploring love and discipline or bedtime and storybook reading, Berends shows the practical relevance of spiritual insights to the most ordinary parental tasks.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Wholeness as Completeness

If you'll be m-i-n-e mine

I'll be t-h-i-n-e

thine,

And I'll l-o-v-e love you

All the t-i-m-e time . . .

--"Zulu King," traditional camp song

We tend to think of ourselves as separate beings (I, the parent--you, the child) existing in relation to each other and trying to perfect ourselves as complete, "whole" persons. Parent and child alike are believed to be completeable, each in quest of wholeness, each to some extent deriving its wholeness from the other. Unconsciously, when we think of loving each other we tend to mean getting wholeness from each other.

But whether we call it love or not, there is a certain built-in contrariness to the idea of many would-be whole selves seeking to get personal completeness from each other. In breast-feeding, for example, the apparent situation is that the mother has got what the child has not. So the mother gives of her self, and the child gets. And what is the mother getting? A sense of personal completeness and a sense of self-sacrifice. On the one hand, she is fulfilling herself and being loving; on the other hand, she may feel secretly robbed and resentful. It takes so much time--much more than she thought. It's so tiring. Must she give up her whole life for her child?

When the child becomes more "self-sufficient," it is time for weaning. Now the mother is relieved and freed, and so is the child. Yet they may both feel cheated. The mother feels less whole, less of a mother if the child is weaned; she is less of a mother if he isn't! And while the child may seem reluctant to give up nursing, underneath it may be the mother's secret clinging that prolongs the nursing and inhibits the child's growing freedom and wholeness.

Fathers also experience such conflicts. A man wants a child to complete his marriage and his picture of himself as a whole father/husband; yet he seems to lose his wife (thereby diminishing his husband self) in the process. He wants his son to be a little man; but at the same time he wants to be in charge, to be looked up to and obeyed.

If we--parent and child--are indeed separate personal entities, each in quest of personal wholeness, such conflicts of self-interest are inevitable. As a doctor's healing work depends on somebody else being sick, so our ambition to be whole parents and raise independent whole children seems to depend on their being dependent on us. Our sufficiency seems dependent on their unsufficiency. Each of us in making our claim to personal wholeness is inclined to rob the other of his claim to wholeness. But where is the love in that? Where indeed? And where is the wholeness? If there is wholeness in any of us, what is this need to go around getting it from somebody else?

If you don't think the title of this book is Whole Parent/Whole Child, then you are the exception. Most people do. Implied is that if the parent is whole, then the child will be whole. If the parent knows how to do it, then the child will turn out okay. But then--oh, horrible thought and worse experience!--if the child seems not to be whole, then the parent must not be whole either. The nine-month-old next door is already walking, while our eleven-month-old hasn't taken a step. The manager of the supermarket says our seven-year-old has stolen a package of gum. From silly to serious, every difficulty suggests to us that the child is not whole, which in turn suggests that we are to blame, which in turn suggests that we are not whole. God forbid!

So we seek diagnoses, explanations for what's wrong with the child. If we can't take credit for our children, then at least please excuse us from the blame! Thank goodness it's dyslexia! I thought it was my fault. I thought he was stupid, lazy. Indeed, recognition of our children's special differences, limitations, styles of learning, and so forth can be very helpful. But there is another side as well. Secretly we are almost grateful to think that there is something really the matter with him, something only mechanical, something wrong with him rather than with us. So in a strange way, the very thing we started out in favor of (rearing a whole child) turns out to be something we are somehow also against.

There are all these hidden clauses--the fine print we don't see when we make this contract to have children and become parents. We act on assumptions and motives we aren't aware of and reap consequences we don't expect.

One mother has a wonderful governess who raised her as a child and now helps with her children. The children love the governess; the governess loves and cares beautifully for the children. Any busy mother would be delighted to have such assistance and such loving care for her children. But this mother feels rejected and jealous! In her picture of her "whole" self she is the complete, perfect mother. She wants her children to love, depend on, and look up to her alone, for everything. But does she really want them to be afraid to leave her side? to find no love anywhere except from her? She sees how ridiculous this is. Yet the desire is very strong. Her desire to be the complete mother conflicts with her being a truly good mother.

Are we using our children? You bet we are. But while we are not as good as we thought, we are not as bad either--only mistaken.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks; 4th edition (June 19, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060928182
• ISBN-13: 978-0060928186
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #210,244 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Spiritual Classics of This Century, June 22, 1999

By A Customer

I had the fortune to begin to read this book 10 years before our twins were born. Whether you are a parent or not Berend's statement of the perennial spiritual wisdom is to be savored and dipped into over and over again. The book is so rich, so moving, so poetic that frequently you will find that you need to stop and reflect on her words after a page or two.

This book, along with Berend's unfortunately out-of-print "Coming To Life", is a true spiritual classic.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spiritual Guidebook to New Parenthood, August 28, 1997

By A Customer

Every now and then a rare book appears which can change your life. This is one.

Polly Berrien Berends is wise and gentle. She brings lofty or deep spiritual insights to the rubber-meets-the-road issues of daily parenting: how is one to approach fears of childbirth? How should one talk to a toddler? How does one decide which toys to buy?

I had the good fortune to read this book just prior to becoming a parent, and if possible, you should too. It is not a quick or easy read, rather a very meaningful one. Sometimes I had to stop and think after only three or four pages. But this was well worth it.

If you are already a parent, or if you may never become a parent, read this book. Although it addresses parenting issues it is really a book about human-being-hood.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, April 16, 2003

By	Earl Hazell (New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

I discovered this at the discount table of a bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky. It does not get old or outdated.

How easily this book could have drifted off into self-indulgent Freudian psychobabble, Fundamentalist moralism or New Age narcissism--all of which Alice Miller has warned us against--in the hands of a less gifted writer. The fact that it doesn't at any time in 340-plus pages is nothing short of miraculous. Polly Berends not only challenges one's view of parenting and loving, but also of Christianity and culture and the universe itself, by bringing mysticism back to the modern Christian mind while not alienating those of other (or no particular) faiths. Filled with transcendent prose, quotes of everything from Buddhist sacred text to the New Testament to e.e. cumming poetry, and the writer's own heart (the heart of a proud mother and wife who walks with God), this is a truly beautiful work that made my mind scream what was important about my personal relationship with my son to me, above the distractions of my ego, with virtually every page.

Consider yourself the child, and this book will help you raise yourself. And then imagine what kind of real parent you can be while following its lessons.

This is the ultimate holiday, Mother/Father's Day or birthday gift for anyone with children, bar none.

Beautiful.