Your Journey to Successful Parenting
Ages 2-11
Your Journey to Successful Parenting is an insightful parenting guide in which a child psychologist sifts through a variety of situations the parents of young children may face, proffering commonsense solutions.
Clinical psychologist Alexandra J. Rogers’s parenting guide Your Journey to Successful Parenting is about encouraging good behaviors, correcting unwanted ones, and establishing positive parent-child dynamics.
Inviting parents to view their interactions with their children through its particular lens, the book includes explanations of how children learn and of how their behavioral patterns are formed before arguing that parental attention is key to promoting positive behavior. It interrogates common struggle areas, including bedtime, homework, and misbehavior at school, to suggest ways of parenting through each. Situations that might require additional intervention, such as mental health concerns and substance abuse, close the book.
Practical recommendations for enacting behavioral changes abound, as do perspective-giving insights into why some children’s decisions are made. Young children refusing to use the restroom or eat dinner, for example, are said to be strong-willed, with the book asserting that such traits tend to be inherited from a parent or involved grandparents. And children who put off their homework assignments are given grace. They might have a learning disability or struggle with perfectionism or time management, the book says; they also might find the work too hard or be holding grudges against the adults in charge. Likewise, children who disobey direct orders are afforded the consideration of possible neurological quirks in which the brain fails to process negative commands. The importance of adults paying attention undergirds all such possibilities, and simple interventions are proposed to help with solutions.
Serious topics like divorce, addiction, and molestation are discussed in a direct and professional manner, and these topics are complemented by frank, commonsense recommendations such as to avoid bad-mouthing an ex-spouse, to have a adolescent child tested for suspected drug use, and to pay attention to the teenagers and adults who have access to each child. Furthermore, the book’s parenting strategies are described in helpful detail and are illustrated well through anecdotes, sample dialogues, images, and tables. A drawing of a parent cradling a toddler, for example, is used to demonstrate helping a child calm down after a tantrum; elsewhere, a table of parental responses is used to rank the effectiveness of some responses over others, as with time-outs versus spanking. And the chapter on behavior charts goes in depth on that specific parenting strategy, which is referenced throughout the book.
Your Journey to Successful Parenting is an illuminating parenting guide that suggests means of promoting positive behaviors and disrupting negative patterns in young children.
Reviewed by
Hannah Pearson
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
