The Best Things Parents Do: Ideas & Insights from Real-World Parents

by Susan Isaacs Kohl

A Best Practices Book That Parents Will Turn To Again And Again

A kind of Mr. Rogers for parents of children of any age who hope to find relief and words of encouragement in the roller coaster of parenting.

Parents are doing a better job than they think they are. Author Susan Kohl has been a parent watcher for more than 30 years, and she knows what parents do well. Whether you are experiencing...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573249025
• ISBN13: 9781573249027
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Conari Press
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Filled with positive, can-do advice

Written by Susan Isaacs Kohl (a preschool director, teacher, parent eduator, and single parent of 30 years' experience), The Best Things Parents Do: You're Doing A Better Job Than You Think You Are is an uplifting self-help guide to nurturing self-sufficiency, high expectations, optimism, and emotional well-being in oneself and one's children. Positive, uplifting chapters guide the reader through means to reinforce family connections and sharing. An upbeat self-help guide filled with positive, can-do advice.

Buy This Book

This book is so refreshing to me as a mother. So often, my parenting books leave me feeling less than perfect, even guilty about what I'm not doing as a parent. Not this one. The Best Thing Parents Do is a supportive and helpful guide to finding your way through the thicket of parenting. It's terrific.

The Best Things Parents Do by Susan Kohl

I love this book. There is so much self-help literature available today...how to lose weight, how to be a better parent, how to get rich, organized, smart, etc. Practically every parenting book one looks at offers advice, sound or otherwise. "The Best Things Parents Do" is unique in its approach. Through a series of vignettes and stories gleaned from her considerable experience as a parent, preschool teacher and director, Ms. Kohl provides examples of real life parents finding creative, loving ways to handle real life challenges with their children.Kohl writes, "What a privilege it is to be the person in a child's life who looks past his weaknesses to see the gifts that will become the gateways for new development." This is exactly what she does for parents! How refreshing! A "must read."

The Best Things Parents Do

I loved this book and found it very helpful. The title caught my eye and I thought, "Now I'll get some ideas from some really good parents". What I found were incredible stories about regular, everyday parents. These parents were experimenting, learning, and trying, to help their children grow in joyful and healthy ways. Their stories are easy to understand and inspired me to try some of their ideas and approaches, modified to fit my own situation. The author, Susan Isaacs Kohl, places each story in the larger context of what the parent is conveying or teaching the child. Like many of us, these parents may not have been aware of the larger picture. They were just getting through a challenging situation as best they could. Having finished the book, the small steps, and the larger picture, are both more available to me in my daily parenting. Definitely a good book!

Parent-friendly advice

I was expecting this book just to be a cheerleading pat-on-the-back for parents who mess up or are merely well-intentioned but it offers incredible real-world advice on how to be a better parent. For example, the observations give guidance on how to handle squabbling siblings in the back seat of the car, etc. Unlike other books that focus just on toddler or just on teens, I found the advice useful for all ages. I've been giving this as a gift to many of my parent friends and with Mother's Day coming...