The natural child: Parenting from the heart a book review
This book talks about all we need to know to rear a healthy, growing child. Beginning right from empathetic parenting to tips to follow in various challenging situations, to the concept of schooling and disabilities, and everything you are looking for as you parent your little one.
Summary: To understand a child, we need to wear the child's glasses. In this book, she discusses the old style of parenting by punishment and proposes the concept of empathetic parenting.
She says that the origin of hurtful parenting is an abused parent himself. This abused parent gives abuse and hurt to her child, and the cycle goes on. She says that this can only be achieved if we choose to pour out unconditional love despite our hurtful childhoods.
She asks the question: Are children and adults made up of two different things? Then why do we use different scales with each of them? When adults do wrong, we say, "Never mind, it happens sometimes." When the same mistake is made by the child, we shout, yell, or even punish them. Is this fair and good? This is the concept she emphasises when she discusses "they don't get it." Here she stresses the need to treat children with dignity and respect.
"Like the rest of us, they respond best to kindness, patience, and understanding. Parents wondering why a child is "misbehaving" might stop and ask themselves this question: "Do I feel like cooperating when someone treats me well, or when someone treats me the way I have just treated my child?"
The key point in her book is the importance of good experiences, not painful ones, which prepare children for adult responsibilities. Thus, we see that throughout, she gave weight to positive parenting skills. She further says that if a delinquent child is there, that means there are also abusive parents who need to be taught positive parenting skills.
Another upcoming concept she highlighted here is that of tough parenting and its consequences. She says that tough parenting makes children lose their trust. She says to love a child means to respect them, have patience and compassion with them, and be gentle to them.
In her book, she explores what spoiling a child means. It has nothing to do with a child's behaviour but with choices of parenting behaviour that damage a child's inborn sense of trust, capacity to love creativity, and potential for joy.
Her narratives with her father and a bunch of wrong practises are real eye-openers about parenting.
She insightfully describes the arrival of a new sibling and the sibling rivalry developed by the elder one. Here she highlights the importance of spacing between children. She also insists on the value of co-sleeping in parenting.
Another gem was when I touched the tantrum section she talked about. This is the place where she spoke of children's ways of communicating.
In her book, she mentioned the golden rule of parenting:
"Treat your child as you would like to be treated if you were in the same position."
This is just the beginning; she mentioned many more aspects like learning from imitation, messages from rewards, homeschooling, grades in school, etc. These words of hers rumble in my head.
"The only function a grade should have is to inform: the most useful information is whether the educational approach being used by the teacher is the appropriate one for that particular child’s current interests and learning style."
I liked the tone and the narration of the book, and every topic she discussed was always in my subconscious mind. Her work synced with my thoughts quite well, and I was happy that there could be child rearing like this.
However, at places, I think she only highlighted one perspective. She is not wrong in those places, but she is not completely right either. I think both ways of analysing the matter would make it more precise and better.
In my view, this is just one book in an ocean that every expectant mother and every mother should read as a Bible to remind them of a worthy pathway towards parenting. It has all the nooks and corners we fall into, and we need to correct ourselves in order to make our kids' lives the most beautiful. We can always refer to it when we feel we are being too harsh on our kids or when we find ourselves losing our temper and patience with them.
Rating: 5/5
About the author: Jan Hunt is a B.A. psychology, MSc. counselling psychology graduate. She is the Director of the Natural Child Project and the Editorial Assistant of the quarterly journal Empathic Parenting, published by the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (CSPCC).
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