The Irreducible Needs Of Children

What do babies and young children really need? This impassioned dialogue cuts through all the theories, platitudes, and controversies that surround parenting advice to define what every child must have in the first years of life. The authors, both famed advocates for children, lay out the seven irreducible needs of any child, in any society, and confront such thorny questions as: How much time do children need one-on-one with a parent? What is the effect of shifting caregivers, of custody arrangements? Why are we knowingly letting children fail in school? Nothing is off limits, even such an issue as whether every child needs or deserves to be a wanted child. This short, hard-hitting book, the fruit of decades of experience and caring, sounds a wake-up call for parents, teachers, judges, social workers, policy makers-anyone who cares about the welfare of children.

Fears, feeding, and sleep problems, croup and tantrums, stomachaches, asthma: these are some of the problems that every parent worries about at one time or another. According to Dr. Brazelton, most of these are a normal part of growing up. Only if parents add their own anxieties to the child's natural drive toward master will these "normal problems" become laden with guilt and tension and deepen into chronic issues. If parents can learn to listen, to hear the stress that may lie behind psychosomatic complaints, they can not only remove some of the excess pressures, but also help their children toward self-understanding.

Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.

Using the relational development approach of Gordon Neufeld, the author offers a road map to making sense of the behavior of young children and understanding their developmental growth.

T. Berry Brazelton, America's most highly regarded and deeply valued pediatrician, is a national treasure. Millions of parents and physicians have used and praised his groundbreaking books on infancy, parenthood, and early childhood. What Every Baby Knows is without question Brazelton's most exciting and valuable book. In What Every Baby Knows, Dr. Brazelton takes five families and really opens the doors of their private lives. In the course of the family histories and in the follow-up visits that Brazelton pays to each family two years later, we come to know these parents and children as individuals -- their stubborn worries, their struggles to adapt to change, their successes at resolving problems. These family histories serve as the framework for Brazelton's illuminating discussions of such crucial family issues as: --sibling rivalry -- divorced parents -- prematurity -- colic -- encouraging independence -- late speech development, and more What Every Baby Knows offers every reader answers to their questions about the real, day-to-day issues that his or her own family faces. The problems Brazelton identifies in the lives of his five families are the universal problems of family life. And the resolutions he describes are as reassuring as they are workable in all family situations. What Every Baby Knows will help all families share the rewards and happiness of life together.

Many sociological, historical and cultural stories can be and have already been told about why it is that parents in post-industrial, western societies face an often overwhelming array of advice on how to bring up their children. At the same time, there have been several philosophical treatments of the legal, moral and political issues surrounding issues of procreation, the rights of children and the duties of parents, as well as some philosophical accounts of the shifts in our underlying conceptualization of childhood and adult-child relationships. While this book partly builds on the insights of this literature, it is significantly different in that it offers a philosophically-informed discussion of the actual practical experience of being a parent, with its deliberations, judgements and dilemmas. In probing the ethical and conceptual questions suggested by the parent-child relationship, this unique volume demonstrates the irreducible philosophical richness of this relationship and thus provides an important counter-balance to the overly empirical and largely psychological focus of a great deal of “parenting” literature. Unlike other analytic work on the parent-child relationship and the educational role of parents, this work draws on first-person accounts of the day-to-day experience of being a parent in order to explore the ethical and epistemological aspects of this experience. In so doing it exposes the limitations of some of the languages within which contemporary “parenting” is conceptualized and discussed, and opens up a space for thinking about childrearing and the parent-child relationship beyond and other than in terms of the languages which dominate the ways in which we generally think about it today.

Greenspan outlines the six stages of emotional growth in early childhood and explores the ways in which they are communicated, emphasizing parental interaction as the key to a child's healthy, emotional maturation.

The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships produce the "familial relationship goods" that people need to flourish. Children's healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child's interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children's values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children. Family Values reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children.

A guide for parents to help children of all ages process the onslaught of unfiltered information in the digital age. Education is not solely about acquiring information and skills across subject areas, but also about understanding how and why we believe what we do. At a time when online media has created a virtual firehose of information and opinions, parents and teachers worry how students will interpret what they read and see. Amid the noise, it has become increasingly important to examine different perspectives with both curiosity and discernment. But how do parents teach these skills to their children? Drawing on more than twenty years’ experience homeschooling and developing curricula, Julie Bogart offers practical tools to help children at every stage of development to grow in their ability to explore the world around them, examine how their loyalties and biases affect their beliefs, and generate fresh insight rather than simply recycling what they’ve been taught. Full of accessible stories and activities for children of all ages, Raising Critical Thinkers helps parents to nurture passionate learners with thoughtful minds and empathetic hearts.

Guide to child development for parents from pregnancy to the first grade.