Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive

This book is informative, insightful, and a must read for everyone not just parents. It will help you understand what is going on in all your relationships (especially your relationships with your children). Participate with the book: do the exercises at the end of each chapter, and you will grow and mature. I am a Marriage Family Therapist and I have all my clients read the book to enhance their therapy and enable them to progress at a faster pace.

This book provides a basis for overcoming your childhood issues and creating a better future for your child and future generations. What could be better than that? I found this book to be one of the best books I've ever read and wish they made everyone read it before having children.

Some readers may find this book "too scientific for a parenting book" but I found it utterly facinating and ate up every word. The age old "nature vs. nurture" debate is examined and the newer concept of nurture effecting nature emerges with either positive or negative outcomes depending on the experiences of the child and the effects of their developing brain. At times I had to take breaks from reading it to allow for integration of all the information, but the effect was that this book changed my parenting philosophy and approach, because instead of asking "what is going on in those little heads??" Now I know.

This parenting book is far more than a "how-to". It examines the importance of the parent child relationship from the perspective of the child's neurological and social development. It challenges parents to examine their own upbringing and to evaluate how their experiences as a child now influence their functioning as a parent. The premises exlpained in the book are supported by recent breakthroughs in brain research. As a psychotherapist who works with children and famlies, this is the book I recommend the most to my clients. At times the writing in the book is somewhat techinical in nature, but there are many stories and exercies for parents that are beneficial even if the reader doesn't understand all of the language.

It's impossible to say something can change your life without slipping into cliche-land, but this book is all about the possibility of change and the crux of life: brain, to mind, to heart, and though the book is too grounded in science to say it, to soul; it's the neurology behind the fact that mind is love; but more than anything the ideas in this book are simply fascinating and useful! I have read other work by Dan Siegel and each time I revisit his sythesis of brain science, attachment theory and a warm-hearted psychiatrist's view of Buber's I-Thou, I am filled with new thoughts and emotions.