The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read

I found myself thinking of the book titled How to Talk to Your Kids while listening to this book. In the end, Perry credits that book as one of her sources of inspiration!

In some ways, this book falls into the category of confirmation bias, as it promotes beliefs I have. However, Perry dives into some of the psychological factors that drive us in our lives. I found this fascinating and I appreciate that Perry never makes one-size-fits-all advice.

The core belief is to protect the relationship by operating with respect and honesty with each other in age appropriate ways. While this seems simple, our feelings in the moment that are informed by our own experience as children.

Some specific ideas I came away with:

• Avoid good and bad evaluations of children and parents. Those evaluations tend to define people without taking time to understand them. (Note: This does not mean abusive parents should not be held accountable.) Putting other parents on an unreasonable pedestal or telling ourselves we are bad distorts reality and distracts from the goal of developing an honest and real relationship.
• Don't own a child's feelings or discount them. Giving them space and permission to work through their feelings is practice for being an emotionally healthy adult. This also develops trust between parent and child for more serious issues as they grow older. A child will seek out a parent they trust to listen to understand and work with them rather than give quick answers without acknowledging the real internal struggle.
• Being honest with children about our feelings develops trust and respect where authoritarian parenting develops distrust and a lack of respect.

I found the way Perry explained and illustrated her points helped me understand her message clearly. Some points have some well known and widely believed criticisms that she takes time to address in a positive fashion that acknowledges the reasons a person would agree with the criticism. In short, she displays in her writing the behavior of taking time to understand without necessarily agreeing with it. In fact, that seems to give more strength to her point.

I recommend this book to parent and teachers and anyone else who desires to build stronger, healthier relationships with loved ones in their lives. Although the book focuses on parent-child relationships, the concepts can be applied to almost any relationship.