Parenting Books: Expert Parenting Advice Versus Mentoring

Posted by Leanna Rae Scott on September 25, 2010
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I began reading parenting books about forty-one years ago. Wow! I really have been parenting that long. Just this year I “retired” from actively parenting minor children. My youngest of thirteen just turned eighteen. In the very beginning, I started reading parenting books because I wanted to learn all about becoming the best mother I could be, and also because my first child threw temper tantrums that I wanted to learn how to eliminate. Yet I didn’t find any tantrum-elimination techniques taught in any of the parenting books I read. And I didn’t find these techniques taught in any of the parenting seminars I went to, either.

I learned by myself how to eliminate tantrums when my fifth child was fourteen months old. (Each of my babies had been tantrum throwers up to that point.) After I figured out what I needed to change in my parenting style with my fifth baby, I used the same techniques with my last eight children from the time they were each born, and it totally prevented temper tantrums in all of them. I also learned, through my experience with preventing tantrums, that the parenting books I had read up to that point had mostly steered me wrong. They had been telling me temper tantrums are unpreventable and inevitable and to simply ignore them. On top of learning (with my fifth child) that it is entirely possible to eliminate temper tantrums, I learned that ignoring tantrums had been part of the cause of them with my first five children.

From my experience, I also learned not to automatically trust parenting advice from “experts.” I learned to assess what they had to say about parenting children before I accepted it. And I recognized that I had discovered what they had not.

I also came to appreciate that as people set themselves up as “experts” in a helping relationship, it includes a connotation that they are the ones who are functional, educated, wise, and healthy-and that the people they advise are dysfunctional, uneducated, unwise, and unhealthy. This is one more reason I don’t like using the title “expert.” I much prefer to view myself as a mentor (or a wise and trusted teacher or advisor). This implies that the wisdom is valid and the trust is earned, and does not imply that recipients of the mentoring are unwise.

It took thirty-three years to prepare for, partially by earning a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies and psychology, and to write what I learned about temper tantrum prevention and elimination as my first parenting book. This is the kind of parenting book I needed to read more than forty years ago. But it’s only just now available.

Parenting books are not all created equal. Go to www.megamomswisdom.com to find great help on parenting children , including “MegaMom’s Wisdom for Tantrums: The Tantrum Book to End All Tantrums.

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