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Subtitle: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development
Author(s): Weissbourd, Richard
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)
Format: Hardcover
List Price: Rs. 1,215
Category: Parenting
ISBN-13: 9780618626175
ISBN-10: 0618626174
Language: English
Pages: 241
Dimensions: 8.48x5.84x.84 in.
Age Range: All Ages
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Overview:
Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd upends received wisdom that the biggest threats to our children's moral development are bad peer influences, violence on television, or parents who fail to teach values. Instead, he argues incisively that parents--often unknowingly--are eroding children's capacity for caring and responsibility.
Through the author's own original field research, including hundreds of rich and revealing conversations with children, parents, teachers, coaches, and counselors, a surprising picture emerges. The suddenly widespread desire of parents to be closer to their children often undercuts kids' morality. Parents' intoxication with their children's happiness is turning many children into fragile conformists who are easily threatened by others. And our fixation with being great parents--and our need for our children to reflect that greatness--can actually make them feel ashamed for failing to measure up.
Like Coles and Kozol, THE PARENTS WE MEAN TO BE delivers a deeply insightful view of our children's moral landscape. Finally, Weissbourd delivers the good news, based on compelling new research, that the intense, crisis-filled, and profoundly joyous process of raising a child can be a powerful force for our own moral development.