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.
I first bought this book in 1976, before my first child was born, and the book and I have undergone many transformations. It is the book I have most often had to replace because I've lent it so often, and cannot be without! It's my favorite gift to expectant parents, too. I am frustrated with guides that only include advice about products, or about discipline, or how-to advice on anything. This book includes those, but has...
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Wow, this book is the one parenting book that I have read that I can say changed my entire way of looking at my job as a mother. The spirituality of being a parent and the spiritual lessons that await us every single day are now so apparent in my mind after reading this book. My relationship with my spirited child and nursing babe has completely been transformed as I process this book and consciously live out the spiritual...
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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 It does not get old or outdated.How easily this book could have drifted off into self-indulgent Freudian psychobabble, Fundamentalist moralism or New Age narcissism--all of which Alice Miller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...
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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...
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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...
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