Your Competent Child: Toward New Basic Values for the Family

by Jesper Juul

Book Overview

A compelling and revolutionary approach to parenting and family dynamics. In this important book, Jesper Juul argues that today's families are at an exciting crossroads. The destructive values that governed traditional hierarchical, authoritarian families are being transformed. Instead we can choose to embrace a new set of values based on the assumption that families must be built not on authoritarian force or democratic tyranny but on dignity and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374527903
• ISBN13: 9780374527907
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Every new parent should get this book

This book offers a very intuitive approach to child rearing. Your strongest tool as a parent is the model your own behavior provides. None of us hesitates to take credit when we can see ourselves in our children's good behavior. This book gently shows how their bad behavior is probably also a reflection of something they're seeing us do and shows ways to correct that. One of the few liberal parenting books that offers concrete help with older kids rather than saying simply "If you raised them differently, they wouldn't be acting like this now."

No Parent Should Be Without It

There are not enough superlatives to describe how helpful this book has been to our family. With tremendous wisdom and a warm, pragmatic eye, Mr. Juul helps us redefine the ways we look at a child's behavior and our relationship to our children and ultimately, each other. This is a book that doesn't offer easy answers or 'tricks' to help in the raising of your child. This is a book that helps you see with a child's eye, hear with a child's ear, and feel with a child's heart in ways that feel so natural and obvious, you will wonder why you haven't thought of them before. But trust me, you haven't. It is a book that offers day-to-day skills along with the thinking that helps generate them, leaving the reader feeling smart and well-satisfied. This groundbreaking book should be on the shelf of all parents everywhere. If you read only one book on raising your child, this is the one.I cannot recommend it highly enough.

A Fabulous, Important Book

Jesper Juul provides parents with such an amazing, simple, and absolutely vital approach to raising children that it rings true on every page. Some of what he suggests we as parents do is difficult - as it is against our "knee-jerk" reactions we may have learned from our parents, but all of it is right on about how we can raise confident, healthy, whole humans, right from the start. Juul suggests that we listen to our children, we trust them, respect them, and approach family as a unit all together, rather than view it as a political structure. As I read the book I was constantly saying to myself "but of course, this makes so much sense", and I was thrilled to have discovered a book that allowed me to see different possibilities with child raising. Anyone with a child will gain immensely from reading this book, seeing themselves (as I did, over and over again) in his numerous examples, and learning how to move on from there. Without reservation, I am grateful for this book and highly recommend it.

Essential reading for parents and childcare staff

This book takes a giant step forward in our knowledge of what children really need. It is based on a wealth of practical experience, but provides a profound theoretical basis for our interactions with children. And is easy to read. It has been available in Scandinavia for some time, and has been used by people I knew while living in Denmark in kindergartens and home environments with great success. (I read the Danish original.)Fundamentally it declares that all children should be treated as unique human beings of equal value. It does not provide strategies or recipes for success. But encourages us to be ourselves when interacting with children, and to actively support them in developing their own sense of self. It explains that there is always a message in children's actions and reactions. And that it is by carefully listening to these underlying messages that we can support our children and find their true needs, and the reasons for apparent problems. In particular this applies to behaviour patterns that we may label as challenging, inappropriate or dysfunctional. The book is well-written, and reveals Jesper Juuls deep wisdom, love and understanding for both children and parents, as well as a good sense of humour and perspective.

If you have children - read this book!

This is an amazing book that will surely turn upside down any thoughts you ever had about raising children. Even though you may not agree with all the views in this book, there is so much food for thought and new ideas that you will return to this book again and again for interesting and mind blowing advice.The book encourages parents to take FULL responsibilty for the family, but in a way that ensures that the child is respected. It offers a new way to raise kids that is not based on power (the oldfashioned way) or democracy (the way of the 70's). I highly recommend it!