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Chancla: Healing Our Families, Ourselves, and Our Culture through Nonviolent Parenting
De la fundadora de Latinx Parenting y coach para padres, Leslie Priscilla, una guía innovadora para superar el trauma y el sufrimiento, dirigida a los latinos que han sufrido la violencia, el abuso y las restricciones de la cultura de la chancla. Para muchos en la comunidad latina, «la Chancla» —lo que aprendemos a ver como la señal de advertencia de la violencia disciplinaria— se ha convertido en un símbolo cultural que ha dado lugar a memes con los que muchos nos identificamos, nos reímos y nos unimos. Pero ¿y si también fuera un símbolo de algo más dañino? En Chancla, la educadora y fundadora de Latinx Parenting, Leslie Priscilla, invita a los lectores, a los padres y a la comunidad latina el legado histórico asociado a la chancla y verlo como una práctica de crianza no violenta que celebra a la cultura latina.Emprender un viaje transformador que los aleje de los ciclos de miedo, vergüenza y castigo corporal.Seguir un camino basado en la conexión, la autorreflexión y la sanación ancestral para sanar la violencia intergeneracional.Combinando relatos personales, contexto histórico y herramientas prácticas, Chancla ayuda a los lectores no solo a criar a sus hijos, sino también a sanar a su niño interior herido. Los lectores se verán reflejados en estas páginas, porque, en última instancia, Chancla los anima a desaprender lo que han heredado y a hacer espacio para lo que se hogares llenos de amor, seguridad y respeto. ----- From the founder of Latinx Parenting and parent coach, Leslie Priscilla, a groundbreaking guide to overcome trauma and suffering, for Latinx who have experience the violence, abuse, and restrictions of the the chancla culture. For many in the Latinx community, “la Chancla”—what we learn to see as the warning sign for disciplinary violence—has become a cultural symbol that has spawned relatable memes that many of us laugh about and bond over. But what if it’s also a symbol of something more harmful? In Chancla, educator and founder of Latinx Parenting, Leslie Priscilla, invites readers, parents, and the Latinx community Embark on a transformative journey that moves them away from cycles of fear, shame, and corporal punishment.Explore the historical legacy associated with the chancla and see it as a nonviolent parenting practice that celebrates Latino culture.Follow a path based on connection, self-reflection, and ancestral healing to heal intergenerational violence. Blending personal storytelling, historical context, and actionable tools, Chancla helps readers not only nurture their children, but their wounded inner child. Readers will see themselves in these pages, because ultimately Chancla encourages them to unlearn what they’ve inherited and make space for what they homes full of love, safety, and respect.
- GenresParenting
304 pages, Hardcover
Published August 18, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 18, 2026
Thank you so much @hachetteus, @littlebrownspark and @latinxparenting for the gifted copy 🫶🏼
As a Latine parent with a graduate degree in Social Work, I found Chancla to be an exceptional and necessary book for parents and professionals alike.
For Latine moms, dads, and caregivers, this provides a guide to connecting with our children by addressing the historical/social context of "Chancla Culture", acknowledging our trauma and grief, walking us through healing our Inner Niñe/a/o, and providing tangible guides for nonviolent parenting - all done with the utmost care, compassion, and empathy.
For social workers, counselors, and those in similar professions, particularly those working with Latine children and families, I highly recommend adding this book to their toolkit. By providing insight into colonialism as the foundation for dehumanization, oppression, and marginalization in Latine and BIPOC communities and sharing knowledge on the values and dynamics of Latine families, Chancla can aid professionals in better understanding, supporting and uplifting Latine families.
This was an informative, insightful, and reflective read. Not only did it connect with me, as I believe it will with other Latine readers, using Spanglish language and cultural references to Sábado Gigante and Vicks Vaporu, but it acknowledged my own childhood relationships and trauma and it validated the feelings I carry as a mother who is also healing from the generational wounds of my parents and their parents before them.
As a Latine parent with a graduate degree in Social Work, I found Chancla to be an exceptional and necessary book for parents and professionals alike.
For Latine moms, dads, and caregivers, this provides a guide to connecting with our children by addressing the historical/social context of "Chancla Culture", acknowledging our trauma and grief, walking us through healing our Inner Niñe/a/o, and providing tangible guides for nonviolent parenting - all done with the utmost care, compassion, and empathy.
For social workers, counselors, and those in similar professions, particularly those working with Latine children and families, I highly recommend adding this book to their toolkit. By providing insight into colonialism as the foundation for dehumanization, oppression, and marginalization in Latine and BIPOC communities and sharing knowledge on the values and dynamics of Latine families, Chancla can aid professionals in better understanding, supporting and uplifting Latine families.
This was an informative, insightful, and reflective read. Not only did it connect with me, as I believe it will with other Latine readers, using Spanglish language and cultural references to Sábado Gigante and Vicks Vaporu, but it acknowledged my own childhood relationships and trauma and it validated the feelings I carry as a mother who is also healing from the generational wounds of my parents and their parents before them.
August 28, 2026
Chancla is the kind of book that feels deeply personal even if you aren’t a parent. This is my culture, and so much of what Leslie Priscilla discusses felt familiar through things I’ve witnessed, heard about, or experienced secondhand within my family and community.
I really appreciated how the book examines something that has been joked about and normalized within Latinx culture and asks us to consider what the chancla actually represents. The conversations around generational trauma, shame, corporal punishment, colonialism, and ancestral healing were incredibly powerful, especially because they never felt like a rejection of our cultura. Instead, the book makes space for loving where we come from while recognizing that not everything needs to be carried into the next generation.
I’m not a parent yet, but this still gave me so much to reflect on. It made me think about the kind of cycles I would want to break if I do become a parent, while also encouraging reflection on our own childhoods, families, and the behaviors we’ve learned to normalize.
The combination of history, personal storytelling, cultural context, and practical guidance made this feel like so much more than a parenting book. It’s also about understanding what we inherited, healing ourselves, and realizing we can honor our families and culture while choosing gentleness, safety, connection, and respect moving forward.
A beautiful, compassionate, and necessary read. I’m really glad a book like this exists for our community.
I really appreciated how the book examines something that has been joked about and normalized within Latinx culture and asks us to consider what the chancla actually represents. The conversations around generational trauma, shame, corporal punishment, colonialism, and ancestral healing were incredibly powerful, especially because they never felt like a rejection of our cultura. Instead, the book makes space for loving where we come from while recognizing that not everything needs to be carried into the next generation.
I’m not a parent yet, but this still gave me so much to reflect on. It made me think about the kind of cycles I would want to break if I do become a parent, while also encouraging reflection on our own childhoods, families, and the behaviors we’ve learned to normalize.
The combination of history, personal storytelling, cultural context, and practical guidance made this feel like so much more than a parenting book. It’s also about understanding what we inherited, healing ourselves, and realizing we can honor our families and culture while choosing gentleness, safety, connection, and respect moving forward.
A beautiful, compassionate, and necessary read. I’m really glad a book like this exists for our community.
August 21, 2026
What a wonderful love letter to the Latine community and the inner child. Leslie approaches this book with compassion, love and cultural humility. I appreciate how it seamlessly weaves in history, lived experience and community responses about the impact of corporal punishment and abuse.
La chancla is required reading for anyone working with Latinx families and all committed to non-violent parenting and leadership!
La chancla is required reading for anyone working with Latinx families and all committed to non-violent parenting and leadership!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I really appreciated what Leslie Priscilla is doing with Chancla. Right away the book feels familiar. It’s written in Spanglish, with cultural words and references woven throughout in a way that makes it feel like it’s speaking directly to our communities.
Leslie breaks down what “chancla culture” actually is and how it became normalized in many Latinx families, especially through oppressive systems that shaped how our elders believed children had to be raised. I appreciated that she doesn’t approach this with blame or shame. There’s a lot of compassion here for our elders who were doing the best they could with what they had.
The book is grounded in both personal experience and parenting education. Leslie talks about the mentors who shaped her work, including Ruth Beaglehole, whose trauma-informed nonviolent child-raising curriculum helped shape her thinking as a parent educator. Throughout the book she shares stories from her own life and from the parenting circles she has facilitated, which makes the ideas feel very real and lived.
This isn’t just a book about nonviolent or decolonial parenting in theory. Leslie offers a lot of support along the way including book recommendations, citations, reflections, and resources that parents can actually return to. The tone is very tender. It feels like someone holding your hand and gently asking you to turn inward so our own emotional wounds don’t end up guiding how we parent.
I loved how each chapter ends with reflections for your inner child, inner parent, and inner elder. That structure alone says so much about the intention behind this work.
To me, this book reads like a balm for intergenerational wounds. It reminds us that healing our families requires repair and that repair often starts within us so we can show up for our children with more attunement, patience, and intention, even on the days we feel overwhelmed or unsure of ourselves.
Leslie breaks down what “chancla culture” actually is and how it became normalized in many Latinx families, especially through oppressive systems that shaped how our elders believed children had to be raised. I appreciated that she doesn’t approach this with blame or shame. There’s a lot of compassion here for our elders who were doing the best they could with what they had.
The book is grounded in both personal experience and parenting education. Leslie talks about the mentors who shaped her work, including Ruth Beaglehole, whose trauma-informed nonviolent child-raising curriculum helped shape her thinking as a parent educator. Throughout the book she shares stories from her own life and from the parenting circles she has facilitated, which makes the ideas feel very real and lived.
This isn’t just a book about nonviolent or decolonial parenting in theory. Leslie offers a lot of support along the way including book recommendations, citations, reflections, and resources that parents can actually return to. The tone is very tender. It feels like someone holding your hand and gently asking you to turn inward so our own emotional wounds don’t end up guiding how we parent.
I loved how each chapter ends with reflections for your inner child, inner parent, and inner elder. That structure alone says so much about the intention behind this work.
To me, this book reads like a balm for intergenerational wounds. It reminds us that healing our families requires repair and that repair often starts within us so we can show up for our children with more attunement, patience, and intention, even on the days we feel overwhelmed or unsure of ourselves.
August 28, 2026
Chancla is a courageous and deeply thoughtful exploration of parenting, cultural inheritance, trauma, and the possibility of breaking generational cycles.
What makes the book particularly compelling is its willingness to examine something that may feel familiar and even humorous within Latinx culture while asking readers to consider the deeper meaning behind it. The chancla becomes more than a cultural reference; it becomes an entry point into conversations about fear, discipline, childhood experiences, and the ways patterns can be passed from one generation to the next.
Leslie Priscilla's approach is especially meaningful because the book does not focus solely on how parents should raise their children. It also encourages adults to look inward and consider the wounds they may still carry from their own childhoods. That emphasis on the inner child gives the discussion of parenting an important dimension of personal healing.
Another strength is the combination of personal storytelling, cultural context, and practical guidance. Rather than simply telling readers what to stop doing, Chancla encourages them to consider what they can build instead: relationships grounded in connection, safety, respect, understanding, and love.
The book should resonate strongly with parents and readers who are questioning inherited approaches to discipline and searching for healthier ways to raise children without abandoning their cultural identity. It also has the potential to open important conversations about intergenerational healing and what it means to consciously choose a different path.
Overall, Chancla is more than a parenting guide. It is an invitation to examine what we inherit, understand how it has shaped us, and decide what we want to pass forward. Its message of replacing fear and punishment with connection and compassion gives the book an emotional relevance that can stay with readers long after they finish the final page.
What makes the book particularly compelling is its willingness to examine something that may feel familiar and even humorous within Latinx culture while asking readers to consider the deeper meaning behind it. The chancla becomes more than a cultural reference; it becomes an entry point into conversations about fear, discipline, childhood experiences, and the ways patterns can be passed from one generation to the next.
Leslie Priscilla's approach is especially meaningful because the book does not focus solely on how parents should raise their children. It also encourages adults to look inward and consider the wounds they may still carry from their own childhoods. That emphasis on the inner child gives the discussion of parenting an important dimension of personal healing.
Another strength is the combination of personal storytelling, cultural context, and practical guidance. Rather than simply telling readers what to stop doing, Chancla encourages them to consider what they can build instead: relationships grounded in connection, safety, respect, understanding, and love.
The book should resonate strongly with parents and readers who are questioning inherited approaches to discipline and searching for healthier ways to raise children without abandoning their cultural identity. It also has the potential to open important conversations about intergenerational healing and what it means to consciously choose a different path.
Overall, Chancla is more than a parenting guide. It is an invitation to examine what we inherit, understand how it has shaped us, and decide what we want to pass forward. Its message of replacing fear and punishment with connection and compassion gives the book an emotional relevance that can stay with readers long after they finish the final page.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Much gratitude to NetGalley and Little, Brown Spark for this ARC.
After finishing this book, I needed a few days to sit with its message... because how do you write a review for a book that feels this timely, necessary, and significant? In Chancla, Leslie Priscilla draws on her expertise as an educator and parenting coach to confront the healing work the Latine/Latinx community must do, not only to process the trauma we have endured, but to prevent that trauma from being passed on to future generations.
At the heart of this book is a powerful call to decolonize - ourselves as individuals, our families, and our approaches to parenting. As Priscilla emphasizes throughout, children are sacred and deserve respect, care, and nurturing. Cycles are broken, she argues, only when we consciously transform the harmful aspects of our culture into practices rooted in love, safety, and accountability.
While the material can be difficult to confront, Priscilla’s writing is clear, compassionate, and accessible. She avoids academic or unapproachable language, weaving professional insight with personal stories and real-life examples that feel honest and deeply relatable.
Though Chancla is written with the Latine/Latinx community in mind, parents of all backgrounds will find invaluable lessons here. As a (step)parent and a Latina with healing work of my own, I’m deeply grateful this book exists, and I know it will remain a trusted guide for many years to come.
After finishing this book, I needed a few days to sit with its message... because how do you write a review for a book that feels this timely, necessary, and significant? In Chancla, Leslie Priscilla draws on her expertise as an educator and parenting coach to confront the healing work the Latine/Latinx community must do, not only to process the trauma we have endured, but to prevent that trauma from being passed on to future generations.
At the heart of this book is a powerful call to decolonize - ourselves as individuals, our families, and our approaches to parenting. As Priscilla emphasizes throughout, children are sacred and deserve respect, care, and nurturing. Cycles are broken, she argues, only when we consciously transform the harmful aspects of our culture into practices rooted in love, safety, and accountability.
While the material can be difficult to confront, Priscilla’s writing is clear, compassionate, and accessible. She avoids academic or unapproachable language, weaving professional insight with personal stories and real-life examples that feel honest and deeply relatable.
Though Chancla is written with the Latine/Latinx community in mind, parents of all backgrounds will find invaluable lessons here. As a (step)parent and a Latina with healing work of my own, I’m deeply grateful this book exists, and I know it will remain a trusted guide for many years to come.
August 31, 2026
I read this as an audiobook but will also be buying a physical copy to keep in my office and to share with friends and family. This is a fantastic and thorough resource on parenting from a perspective that is rooted in the Latinx-American experience.
I appreciate that the author includes personal experiences as a parent (and child) into each chapter to help the reader understand the concepts she is introducing. She is thoughtful and grounded in her messaging and I could tell that she really took time to think about how she wanted to say something from a place of understanding that the reader may be defensive at times.
That said, it can be challenging to read this book, to re-experience, remember some of your own childhood wounds. Although I feel I have processed a lot that come up in the book, I still found myself wanting to step back and take time before continuing to read. The only thing I wish she would have mentioned, and maybe this could be a second edition addition, is a chapter on how neurodivergence also impacts parenting as a Latinx parent. I highly recommend this book, it should be required reading for all adults who are around children.
I appreciate that the author includes personal experiences as a parent (and child) into each chapter to help the reader understand the concepts she is introducing. She is thoughtful and grounded in her messaging and I could tell that she really took time to think about how she wanted to say something from a place of understanding that the reader may be defensive at times.
That said, it can be challenging to read this book, to re-experience, remember some of your own childhood wounds. Although I feel I have processed a lot that come up in the book, I still found myself wanting to step back and take time before continuing to read. The only thing I wish she would have mentioned, and maybe this could be a second edition addition, is a chapter on how neurodivergence also impacts parenting as a Latinx parent. I highly recommend this book, it should be required reading for all adults who are around children.
August 19, 2026
Happy Pub Day to @latinxparenting ✨
Chancla by Leslie Priscilla, Latinx Parenting
Healing our Families, Ourselves, and Our Culture through Nonviolent Parenting
A parenting guide that helps break down toxic generational cycles and helps to heal, learn and unlearn. 11 chapters full of beautiful reflections, real understandings and interactive pages that are excellent tools for breaking the generational patterns that are instilled in our Latine communities. Leslie helps us all understand what chancla culture looks like and how to breakdown those barriers.
“Healing isn’t betrayal… it’s the most radical act of love for our families and ourselves. “
Thank you for sending me a copy.✨
Everyone should go add Chancla to your TBR lists.✨
Chancla by Leslie Priscilla, Latinx Parenting
Healing our Families, Ourselves, and Our Culture through Nonviolent Parenting
A parenting guide that helps break down toxic generational cycles and helps to heal, learn and unlearn. 11 chapters full of beautiful reflections, real understandings and interactive pages that are excellent tools for breaking the generational patterns that are instilled in our Latine communities. Leslie helps us all understand what chancla culture looks like and how to breakdown those barriers.
“Healing isn’t betrayal… it’s the most radical act of love for our families and ourselves. “
Thank you for sending me a copy.✨
Everyone should go add Chancla to your TBR lists.✨
August 25, 2026
For my social work/therapist friends, this is a book that may help set a foundation when working with Latine families. (If given directly it might be beneficial to review some terms and theories.) The book reviews attachment styles, neurological structures, and trauma responses while linking to themes that may be found in Latine cultures.
Now as a reader who is a mother and daughter this one holds a familiar struggle; professionally I understand this topic but continue to struggle in my need to make resilient Latine children. This book provides validation and encourages growth centered in cultura. A reminder that resilience is found in the relationship.
Now as a reader who is a mother and daughter this one holds a familiar struggle; professionally I understand this topic but continue to struggle in my need to make resilient Latine children. This book provides validation and encourages growth centered in cultura. A reminder that resilience is found in the relationship.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This was such a beautiful book. An amazing look into Latinx culture and the struggles many of us have grown up with. I saw so much of myself in Leslie and her experiences, especially as someone trying to stray from my own upbringing. This book taught me a lot about myself especially this: it was not my fault.
August 25, 2026
A very personal book with a lot of good information.
August 26, 2026
Meshes well with my day job and my own lived experiences.
Will report back after attending her author talk
Will report back after attending her author talk
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews