Some parents are invigorated by their children, some are alienated. But, they all think about them, love them, and want to like them. Faced with distressed children, parents often lose their compass. They search for a path that will help them understand and get to know their children better. Quite often misbehaviors are the beacon to a child’s emotional struggles. Parents ask, “Why does my child behave that way?” When parents understand that there are meanings behind these behaviors, underlying problems are revealed, and solutions naturally follow as parents and child grow together.
My plan is to help parents experience the heightened energy and deep satisfaction that comes with becoming meaning-makers empowered to read their child’s actions by unlocking their Parental Intelligence.
How can parents find meaning in their child’s behavior? The reader will take away a new style of parenting life that will sustain them through happy and distressing times with their children through all stages of child development. Parents will be able to understand what’s happening in their child’s mind. The key lies in the Five Steps to Parental Intelligence that looks at the parent’s and child’s unconscious mind when solving problems.
Parental Intelligence is a concept I created when working with parents in my private practice who learned how to “read” non-verbal as well as verbal communication and enjoy open dialogue. The steps are a guide for the parent who faces baffling behaviors and hard-to-reach children, including those with special needs.
Parents should never be underestimated even when they doubt themselves. Learning how to harness the knowledge they have about their child by following the five steps reviewed below leads them to unlock their Parental Intelligence and find resolutions to their children’s problems.
- Stepping back helps a parent to review what has happened.
- Self-reflecting encourages parents to revisit the ghosts from the past that influence their own reactions.
- Understanding your child’s mind opens windows onto the child’s world with its own particular point of view.
- Understanding your child’s development clarifies what to expect cognitively and socially from your individual child.
- Finally, problem solving will lead to long-lasting solutions to the pressing problems that seem, at first, to have no possible resolution.
Experience compassionate stories of mothers and fathers using Parental Intelligence that reveal how they resolve problems with their children. Examples range from infants to toddlers, from tweens to adolescents, from the typical–if there is such a thing–to those with special-needs.
Included are stories about:
- a baby’s first six months
- an adopted child’s first two years
- a four-year-old with high functioning Asperger’s
- a six-year-old identical twin
- an eight-year-old with ADHD
- an outgoing thirteen-year-old
- a depressed fifteen-year-old
- and a brilliant seventeen-year-old.
You will meet a stay-at-home father, a single-parenting mother, couples whose marriages are holding on by a thread, and intact families that cross the boundaries of economic levels, social class and education. Half the stories focus on the father as the pivotal character.
All the while, learn about contemporary research on the intrauterine environment, the “new wave of scheduled socialization,” “the new adolescent autonomy,” autistic communication, fatherhood and more. The similarities and differences between how mothers and fathers carry out the Five Steps to Parental Intelligence are explored. The once often overlooked parent, the father, is fully revealed with respect to his importance as a sensitive, responsive, nurturing parent for newborns, children, and adolescents.
Finally, imagine the future where Parental Intelligence is the norm, as you get immersed in an essay about its broad effects, not only on the family, but on society as well.