Terri Apter - The Confident Child: Raising Children to Believe in Themselves

PRAISE FOR THE BOOKS OF TERRI APTER. PH.D.

On The Confident Child:

Convincing, well-written and truly helpfulsuggests concrete ways for parents to help their children like themselves and feel confident.

Publishers Weekly

Terri Apter convinces the reader that she is on our side and even has a useful chapter called How to Be an Imperfect Parent Without Ruining Your Childs Life. Her wisdom is tempered by warmth and a rueful acknowledgment that she hasnt always got it right herself, which is totally disarming.

Mary Hoffman, author of Amazing Grace

On Altered Loves:

Simply wonderfula fresh vision that blows away old stereotypes, dated theories, male biases and familiar patterns of blame. It is a model of lucid research and writing.

The New York Times

On Working Women Dont Have Wives:

She touches a resonant chordprovides a useful focus on the sources of the enormous resistance that makes change so difficult.

The New York Times

A thoughtful analysis of an extraordinarily complex problem.

Kirkus Reviews

On Secret Paths:

Lively and revealingApter also provides insightful passages on the balance of power as it shifts in midlife marriages; on love and disengagement in the relationship between midlife women and their mothers; and on the nature of love and experience as they apply to women at this time in their lives.

The New York Times

An extremely important bookHer writing offers perceptions rare in psychology.

Carol Gilligan

Altered Loves: Mothers and Daughters during Adolescence

Working Women Dont Have Wives: Professional Success in the 1990s

Secret Paths: Women in the New Midlife

The Myth of Maturity: What Teenagers Need from Parents to Become Adults

You Dont Really Know Me: Why Mothers and Daughters Fight, and How Both Can Win

The Sister Knot: Why We Fight, Why Were Jealous, and Why Well Love Each Other No Matter What

for Miranda, Julia, Brian, and Adrienne

I wish to thank the parents and children who attended my workshops in Cambridge, shared their problems, and tested solutions with me. Their optimism, humor, warmth, and trust were crucial to shaping this book. In the course of the past ten years, ongoing conversations with my sister, Marion Quinn, persuaded me that parents needed a book to help them motivate and support their children. Together we mused over the difficulty of sustaining a very young childs exuberant confidence through the challenges of middle childhood. As parents, we felt that in our most important job we faced an obstacle course through which we wanted to preserve a childs goodness, while shaping character. We pooled observations about effective methods of discipline. We wondered how we would sustain our influence as our children made their way in school and among peers. Geographical distance did nothing to impede these conversations, but I wanted to give them a broader canvas and a research-based structure.

This aim was facilitated by conversations I had with Judy Dunn and by her work on the connections between emotion and understanding in development. Her ability to combine theoretical sophistication with day-to-day observations helped structure my sense of the important ways parents can pass on their knowledge about emotions to children. Jim Gilligans searching questions about the importance of self-esteem inspired me at a time when I had only the vaguest notion of embarking on this project. Throughout the past ten years, Nancy Chodorow, Mary Jacobus, Michelle Stanworth, Sandra Gilbert, and Mary Hamer have offered essential reality checks to problems and questions that have arisen in our mutualbut very differentparenting experiences. I see this book not as an end, but as a continuation of such conversations that are going on between parents everywhere.

My agent, Meg Ruley, was always available as a sounding board for my ideas, and her attention has been invaluable. My editor, Jill Bialosky, while experiencing one of the most demanding phases of parenthood herself, continued to parent this project with her expert guidance and support.