Whole Child / Whole Parent

If you don’t think the title of this book is Whole Parent / Whole Child, then you are the exception. Most people do. Implied is that if the parent is whole, then the child will be whole. If the parent knows how to do it, then the child will turn out okay. But then — oh, horrible thought and worse experience! — if the child seems not to be whole, then the parent must not be whole either.

So we seek diagnoses, explanations for what’s wrong with the child. If we can’t take credit for our children, then at least please excuse us from the blame. I thought it was my fault. I thought he was stupid, lazy. Indeed, recognition of our children’s special differences, limitations, styles of learning, and so forth can be very helpful. But there is another side as well. Secretly we are almost grateful to think that there is something really the matter with him, something only mechanical, something wrong with him rather than with us. So in a strange way, the very thing we started out in favor of (rearing a whole child) turns out to be something we are somehow also against.

This book stands out as one of the first resources to link the teachings of mystics and the world’s religious traditions to the present-day practice of child-rearing. Polly Berrien Berends’s second intention is “to bring to light the far-reaching spiritual significance of even the meanest momentary details of our experience.

For more than two decades, Whole Child / Whole Parent, the first spiritually oriented book on parenthood and the first to address the value of parenthood for the parent as well as for the child, has provided a sound, practical, psychological and spiritual footing for parenthood and family life.