- Book: The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did)
- Author: Philippa Perry
- ISBN-13: 9780241251027
I've seen this book recommended a lot since I became a parent. I took a while to come around to reading it, but I'm very glad I did.
I'm making a conscious effort this year to improve as a parent, and to work on my mental health. This is an interesting combination of the two, focusing on parenting, but also looking deeply at your own childhood, and your relationships with others beyond parent/child.
There’s a lot going on in this book, and a lot of it hit home pretty hard. Looking back at the past isn't always easy, especially when revisiting it with the perspective of being a relatively new parent.
But I got a lot from reading it. In particular, I got a lot of reassurance that while the approach that my wife and I take to parenting is hard work at the moment, there’s a payoff. It’s worth it, for everyone involved. You just need to put the work in to figuring it out, because the instinctive reaction, the one learned in childhood, may not be the best one. And working past something that's so ingrained that it's almost instinct is hard to do.
Highlights
I highlighted a lot of this book. I'll share some of them here, although the full context of the book adds a lot to the writing.
General good advice:
Expand your comfort zone. By doing the thing your inner critic says you can’t, you’ll find more confidence. It’s a real thing you can remember when self-doubt creeps in.
From the section on How To Argue, full of great advice on how to deal with hard situations and feelings with other grownups, especially your partner:
none of us is perfect and we all make mistakes. It is not the mistakes that matter so much, it’s how we put them right.
This is also really good advice as a parent. You can and will make mistakes. But what matters is how you accept and fix them, and that's really important to show your children too.
How to connect with someone having a hard time:
This is true for everyone, child and adult. When we feel bad, we don’t need to be fixed. We want to be felt with rather than dealt with.
How to handle bad feelings:
when you try to block out a ‘negative’ feeling, you remove positive feelings too.
On being kind:
Whichever philosophy you are more inclined to follow, remember that acceptance, warmth and kindness are the things that matter most when it comes to our children (and most other relationships as well).
More on being kind:
No one was ever healed by being made to feel ashamed or silly.
From “And Finally, When We’re All Grown Up”, because parenting doesn't stop once the child becomes an adult, it just evolves:
It means a lot to adult children when their parents take an interest, non-intrusively, in their lives.
