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Summary: If you want to understand children...
Review: "The Natural Child" is an important book, clearly written and full of common sense. Reading this book, for me, has been like meeting a friend - someone who speaks the truth about children and what they need, not mincing words, and bringing home the need to respect children because they are people! I will treasure this beautiful book.
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Summary: The BEST parenting book out there
Review: A must read for all parents...This book was like a breath of fresh air! What a joy to hear a parent talking about being on the same team as your child. You don't have to be the "bad guy" with your child. The most important concept is that by following your heart, you as the parent know what is best for your child. Families everywhere will be happier b/c of this book!
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Summary: The BEST parenting book out there
Review: A must read for all parents...This book was like a breath of fresh air! What a joy to hear a parent talking about being on the same team as your child. You don't have to be the "bad guy" with your child. The most important concept is that by following your heart, you as the parent know what is best for your child. Families everywhere will be happier b/c of this book!
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Summary: All Parents Should Read This Book!
Review: As a first-time parent, I wholeheartedly recommend Jan Hunt's "The Natural Child" to new and experienced parents alike. Through riveting stories and informative articles, Hunt explores controversial issues and reveals fundamental truths that can help anyone to be a better parent.Her expert advice gives parents the courage to forgo society's conventional rules regarding the way we treat children, and encourages parents to feel confident in following their deeply rooted instincts about child rearing. Hunt urges parents to treat children with respect, empathy, and compassion, and to trust and believe in their children. Hunt insists that children behave as well as they are treated and promotes mutual respect between parent and child. Modern society teaches us to ignore our babies and punish our children but Hunt gives us the courage to follow our hearts instead.
Hunt stresses two important points. First, children are no different from adults in that they feel good and behave well when treated with kindness, patience, and understanding and feel bad and behave poorly when threatened, punished, and humiliated. Second, a child's misbehavior offers a chance to validate their feelings and to help them learn important lessons. Punishment eliminates the opportunity to learn from problems and focuses instead on the child's feelings of anger and resentment. Hunt emphasizes the importance of bonding through responding to your baby's cries, extended breastfeeding, family co-sleeping, lots of touching and holding, and minimal separations from Mom. She stresses that you can't love your child too much. If parents meet their children's needs starting very early, those children will later become healthy, confident, independent adults. Having embraced Hunt's beliefs and practiced attachment parenting with great success, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I believe society would vastly improve if more people employed Hunt's beliefs and suggestions.
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Summary: Puts it all together
Review: For years I've looked to Jan Hunt's website for cutting edge articles on how we can better relate to children. She is always provocative, reassuring, refreshing, and right on. Now, at last she's put her wisdom, and that of her mentors, into a very readable book.
John W. Travis, MD, MPH (Simply Well and Wellness Workbook), co-founder, Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children
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Summary: Basic and warm
Review: Having seen this book mentioned in several places, I decided to see what all the talk was about. My judgment is that it is lovingly and carefully written, imploring the reader to put aside conventional (read: institutional) ways of viewing children and allow them to be the natural thinkers and learners they are at birth. I usually am extremely careful about new books in case I decide to give them to a friend or resell them. But this one I dog-eared with love as I am sure I will keep it and return to it again and again. This is not a long book, but it doesn't need to be to impart its message: TRUST your child. Trust her natural wisdom and curiosity. Treat your child respectfully as you want to be treated. I heartily recommend this book to any and all.
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Summary: Basic and warm
Review: Having seen this book mentioned in several places, I decided to see what all the talk was about. My judgment is that it is lovingly and carefully written, imploring the reader to put aside conventional (read: institutional) ways of viewing children and allow them to be the natural thinkers and learners they are at birth. I usually am extremely careful about new books in case I decide to give them to a friend or resell them. But this one I dog-eared with love as I am sure I will keep it and return to it again and again. This is not a long book, but it doesn't need to be to impart its message: TRUST your child. Trust her natural wisdom and curiosity. Treat your child respectfully as you want to be treated. I heartily recommend this book to any and all.
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Summary: A rare and guiding light of a book
Review: I am a clinical psychologist with a lot of experience working with families and parenting issues, and I have seldom read a book with as much profound insight and practical value as "The Natural Child." It is one of those rare books which is transformational in nature. If only parents dealing with complicated and unfortunate difficulties with older children could have read this book before they got started - I might be out of a job. In a marvelously clear, respectful, and direct fashion the author brings to light the simple, common sense principle(s) and practices for helping children grow with a strong sense of inner worth, dynamic creativity, and solid inner happiness, all characteristics of those rare and exceptional individuals Abraham Maslow refers to as "self-actualized."
How do happy, productive, and caring individuals get that way? What is the principle? In its most elementary form the author asserts it is nothing other than the wisdom of the Golden Rule itself applied to our most important responsibility - helping our children realize their full dynamic and creative potential - helping them grow with an unshakable appreciation for the magnificent miracle that human life truly is. Indeed, this is what all parents want.
It's a matter of gold or garbage. The heart of an impressionable newborn is like an empty emotional vessel, completely innocent and fully magnificent in its potential, but containing as yet no emotional resentments, no disturbance, and no negative patterns or destructive pathologies resorted to in later years to try and cope with an inner sense of "something missing" or with unconscious emotional scars. These diversions happen, (you name it - addictions, crime, emotional disorders, and so on... ), when the experience of being fully loved as a child is found in some way to be less than it should have been. These inner, emotional patterns and realities are the ones that get fixed first in life and are the deepest - the ones most powerful in terms of influencing behavior and experience throughout the remainder of life. When little hearts are filled with gold, gold is what you get. Filled with garbage, garbage is what you get.
According to the author, the gold is meeting the real and legitimate needs of children, as nature intended - the vital need for unconditional love which encompasses all the following: having a child's innate desire to live and do right be trusted, the experience of full joyousness with life, the freedom to explore interests, a strong sense of individual worth, loving and positive interaction with parents and others, and the right nourishment, both physical and emotional. The garbage is anything less than that, all the "half-truths" and often confusing alternatives. Unfortunately, in today's society, the garbage is too often mistaken for the gold.
For example, many today still believe that some form of punishment is necessary to create good values and behavior. Some think it gold, but what an unfortunate fallacy. The author explains this so clearly that given a little honesty and open-mindedness it can't be missed. "Punishment, threats, and humiliation never achieve long-term goals because they provoke anger, create resentment, and diminish the bond between parent and child." The author offers practical and growth-oriented alternatives - what to do instead. Again, some believe that allowing infants to "cry it out" is gold because it develops character or some such thing - but it is fools gold only. "In all innocence, a baby assumes that we, her parents, are correct -whatever we do is what we ought to be doing. If we do nothing, the baby can only conclude that she is unloved because she is unlovable." Again, practical and healthy alternatives are provided. Or, that co-sleeping with your children has inherent risks, isn't right somehow, or may spoil an infant. However, "Cribs force babies to face the long night alone years before they are psychologically equipped to do so. Isolation teaches harmful messages of mistrust, forced "co-operation" through despair, and instills a deep sense of loneliness that no teddy bear can fulfill." Again, all the initial doubts and practical considerations about family co-sleeping are covered. And these are only examples.
The remarkable value of this book lies in its ability to shed light on and reinforce much of what already exists in the heart of the parent, but may not be clear enough to act upon. In this sense, her work truly advocates perfectly "natural" parenting, freeing parents from societal misconceptions and expectations and pointing the way for parenting to be a process guided by the deepest levels of one's own heart. It dispels the confusion about what full and unconditional love is and really means, and provides abundant practical advice on how to hold that wholly vital principle as the only viable principle for raising happy children - real, genuine, and brilliantly glowing gold.
I'm not just recommending this book. I implore you to read it and share what you gained with those young or expecting families you care about. In a world which in many ways has signs for hope, this book is ahead of its time. It is the parenting of an enlightened future. It ought to be required reading in school. On the five star system provided, I give "The Natural Child" a full ten stars.
I should also mention that the author, Jan Hunt, offers telephone counseling and maintains a comprehensive and highly respected website. See "The Natural Child Project." It contains a wealth of excellent information and articles from a variety of relevant authors.
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Summary: Collection of insightful well written essays about children
Review: I found this book through my local AP group. The group's bookclub read it, and gave it rave reviews. The book is a collection of essays about parenting (the introduction explicitly states that the book is a collection of essays -- one of the reviews below did not seem to realize that fact). The essays are well written and very insightful. The book challenges parents to be the best that we can possibly be, and it provides lots of practical information for handling tricky situations in a loving and respectful manner. For example, there are essays about shopping with children, ten ways we misunderstand children, how to choose a health care provider, alternatives to punishment, and more. The book also has an interesting essay regarding "natural grandparenting." The book is fascinating and difficult to put down. I highly recommend it to everyone seeking to improve their relationships with the children in their lives.
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Summary: So grateful for this very important and inspirational book!
Review: I honestly can not imagine a more complete or clearly written book on the intuitive art of parenting. Jan Hunt encourages us to trust and follow our natural instincts to love and respect our children, assuring us that the result will be healthy and secure children who inevitably turn into competant, well-adjusted adults who can then come together to co-create a peaceful and harmonious society and world. What truth! Yes! I love this book!!!!
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