Reflective Parenting

by Sheila Redfern, Sheila Redfern

Have you ever wondered what’s going on in your child’s mind? This engaging book shows how reflective parenting can help you understand your children, manage their behaviour and build your relationship and connection with them. It is filled with practical advice showing how recent developments in mentalization, attachment and neuroscience have transformed our understanding of the parent-child relationship and can bring meaningful change to your own family relationships. Alistair Cooper and Sheila Redfern show you how to make a positive impact on your relationship with your child, starting from the development of the baby’s first relationship with you as parents, to how you can be more reflective in relationships with toddlers, children and young people. Using everyday examples, the authors provide you with practical strategies to develop a more reflective style of parenting and how to use this approach in everyday interactions to help your child achieve their full potential in their development; cognitively, emotionally and behaviourally. Reflective Parenting is an informative and enriching read for parents, written to help parents form a better relationship with their children. It is also an essential resource for clinicians working with children, young people and families to support them in managing the dynamics of the child-parent relationship. This is a book that every parent needs to read.

Genres: Parenting

234 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2015

Reviews

[Marieta Murg · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I like about this book is that it goes beyond parenting and highlights a crucial need of every human relationship, empathy. We almost never try to understand the other person's point of view and we almost never acknowledge that they certainly filter life /events differently than us.

Basically, what this book talks about is learning how to see things from a different perspective, in this case that of your child.

Children have a limited set of resources to help them cope with intense feelings and emotions, which is why they often throw tantrums, hit, scream or destroy things. The fact that they don't understand their emotions, can't identify them and don't know how to deal with them is what we as parents first need to accept; then we need to offer them empathy, care and support, as well as the right tools to help them overcome these feelings.

There is a lot to be said about the techniques presented in the book, but everyone who will read it will see what I mean. I particularly enjoyed the examples provided because I found them very realistic, like any situation could (and does) occur in real life and it's not at all exaggerated.

I would definitely recommend this book to parents of toddlers & small children.

[Michelle Olms · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book