Australian Broadcasting Corporation. - Heart to Heart Parenting

You are the most important person in your childs life. A scary idea maybe, but theres no getting around it. As is now known, when it comes to your childs emotional health, genes play only a small role in your childs personality and unique way of relating to others. Your relationship with your child matters far more than genes do. This is great news: it means we parents can be an enormously positive influence in our childrens lives, from conception onwards. So, how will this book help you as you make your way along the wondrous and challenging journey of being a parent?

This is not a how-to book. It doesnt seek to answer questions such as what to do when your child does such-and-such. The purpose of this book is to place at your fingertips the best that has been learnt about children and their emotional needs, and then to help you decide how to apply this information you are in charge. For this reason, every major idea in this book will be based on published scientific evidence and/or clinical experience. So, while the first aim of this book is to arm you with the newest information that the child development sciences have provided, the second is to show you how to connect with your own inner expert.

The better we know ourselves the more effective parents we become. Getting to know yourself better as a parent involves learning how your own childhood experiences have affected you. This book contains a number of simple but powerful exercises that can help you connect deeply with the treasury of wisdom you possess, a wisdom you have gained from having been a baby and a child yourself. Connecting with this knowledge inside you will give you the confidence to weigh up the advice of professionals and decide what feels right and what doesnt. This inner journey can bring forth your personal and unique ways of meeting your childrens needs, and enable you to discover that your heart is filled with loving impulses and wisdom beyond your expectations. This book is less about what to do, and more about how to be.

As you get to know yourself better and come to better understand how your childhood experiences have strengthened you as well as wounded you, you not only become a far more effective parent, but you are also transformed and healed through the experience of parenting your children. Your relationship with your child, with all its frustrations, heartbreaks and joys, causes your heart to grow and, in the process, you gain in wisdom, humility, patience and humour.

The emphasis of this book is about emotional health, yours and your childs. Your childs wellbeing and your own are intricately woven together; we are all better carers when we feel cared for. So, although Heart to Heart Parenting is primarily about your childs emotional health, it is also about your personal growth as a parent. There is help in these pages for the issues you face along the way, and reassuring guidance for the emotional terrain you travel. It covers your journey together from the time your child becomes conscious in the womb, through the crucial time of birth and the bonding that follows, up to the first seven years or so.

This book does not discuss issues of academic or physical development such as developmental milestones for walking, reading or computing maths problems, so you might need additional advice regarding these areas of development. A few parenting tips can be helpful, but I am offering you something more empowering than that. No matter how handy, tips can be traps. Tips can be a mechanistic approach to parenting, an approach that does not necessarily help you to connect with your child as a person. Tips give you the illusion that when your child does this, then if you do that, the problem will be solved. This push-button approach may backfire in the end because your child does not feel connected to you when you are manipulating the situation, however expertly. Our children do not want us to be techno whizzes or personnel managers; they want us to be people and they want to be treated as people. So tips can certainly help, but you need more, you need to find ways to make the deepest connections with your child. When you connect deeply with your child, whatever you do will work and whats more, you will be doing it your way.