By Manju Gupta
Love without Spoiling, Discipline without Nagging by Cedric M. Kenny, Wisdom Tree, 397 pp, Rs 295.00
This very moderately priced book considering the number of pages and quality of production, not to forget the textual contents, is a valuable guide for Indian parents who have to traverse through the often pleasurable, but more often arduous, journey of parenthood. The author Cedric M. Kenny has used his long years of experience in dealing with children and with their parents to write this very practical guide.
?Being parents is a terrific experience, but parenting could be terrifying for most parents. Raising kids is a daunting task because what works for one may not work for others because kids aren'tmathematical equations where two plus two adds to four. Worse still, when they are born, they don'tcome with a User Manual to guide you on parenting: on how to operate a kid'supbringing, and which buttons to press. So you have to charter your own path, unique to each family, as you make your way through the labyrinth of choices of what is right and what is wrong.? Let not the reader be deterred by these warning words but treating these as the base, continue reading how to handle the toddler or the teenager but remember, before we clone the perfect human being, we will have to perfect ourselves in order to strike the right balance between the head and the heart.?
Divided into five sections, Kenny'sbook is directly addressed to the urban educated class on bringing up their children. He tackles issues of confronting contradictions, bringing clarity to areas of confusion and darkness. Without being didactic, he uses everyday situations and case studies to bring home some basic lessons of life and ?wellness? of living.
The first section of the book emphasises the importance of a loving home which nurtures empowerment by making you reflect on family values, marriage commitment, career and relationships with parents and in-laws as these affect individual parenting styles.
This book should be read by all parents and parents-to-be. A book not meant to be read in one go?but slowly and gradually, chapter-wise so that the contents can be read, savoured, mulled over and pondered upon to find answers to life'svexatious problems before proceeding to the next.
The second section is about raising healthy kids, in which the author shows how to administer the daily dose of sleep as a refreshing health tonic and to discipline the child. It shows how to adopt techniques of behaviour modification skills to overcome your child'stantrums, stubbornness and negative behaviour.
The third section shows ways of raising happy kids?applaud when they perform acts of service, i.e. when they help in household chores or assist teachers in carrying notebooks. It also reveals how language problems can be overcome and how ?slow learners? can be encouraged to come up to the standards of the normal students.
The fourth section, divided into two parts, takes you in the first part on a journey of enlightenment in a nursery school culture and how to prepare your toddler to explore a new world of school experiences; the second part is related to learning disabilities due to stressful lifestyles that trigger a deadly cocktail of stress chemicals like cortisone and dopamine into the bloodstream which children inherit from their parents.
The fifth section is dedicated to raising ?tweens? and teens and relates to problems of adolescents who desire to carve their own unique identities. Part II of this section gives some tested and tried methods to teach adolescents how to bond with their schools by mastering study skills.
The Appendix at the end shows how the years of alienation (adolescence period) of the teen with his parents can be converted into a bond.
This book should be read by all parents and parents-to-be. A book not meant to be read in one go?but slowly and gradually, chapter-wise so that the contents can be read, savoured, mulled over and pondered upon to find answers to life'svexatious problems before proceeding to the next.
(Wisdom Tree, C-209/1 Mayapuri II, New Delhi-110 064.)
