In an age of endless parenting guides, it's easy to get overwhelmed with strategies for kids' successes or dealing with family conflict. Most approaches get bogged down in the details, but social and emotional circumstances can be completely different for two kids living in the same house, much less the millions around the world. It's hard to believe anything that claims it has a "one size fits all" approach to helping children grow into adults.
Ross Greene's Raising Human Beings tries to split the difference, providing a general rubric for how to address issues in parenting without suggesting specific outcomes. Instead, he argues, outcomes should be a collaboration between child and parent, with each party trying to address the others' needs.
If that sounds like quite a challenge, Greene is sympathetic. He doesn't provide quick solutions to parenting (one should be wary of experts who do). Instead, he digs into ways that parents can present themselves as problem-solvers to their children, all the while understanding that this can be a harder or easier task depending on age, family and what conflict the parent is trying to resolve.
While Raising Human Beings is persuasively argued, there are a couple of stylistic choices that might irk readers. When referring to things like adulthood, Greene has a tendency to use the phrase "The Real World," as if giving it a portentous name somehow is more meaningful than saying "life." Likewise, he has a tendency to fall into rhetorical questions more than necessary. But these are small issues amidst overall useful instructions for how to support one's child. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing and development manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.