“Millions of people raise great kids.”
I have frequent reminders of this fact and had one just the other night when I met my friend David and his family for pizza at Comet Ping Pong, just up Connecticut Avenue from where Marcy and I live.
David and I have know each other from way back in the day when he was a disc jockey at Georgetown University’s student radio station WGTB (and arguably the best radio station ever in DC), as well as a local concert promoter. David in fact, with our friend, Bob Boilen, promoted the now legendary Urban Verbs/Cramps “Hall of Nations” show in 1979, which has been sited by Bob, Dave Grohl, Henry Rollins and Ian and Alec Mac Kaye as being inspirational to their decision to become musicians.
So David and I go way back, but I’d never met his family before. His wife Denise is lovely and had been around the early music scene, although I was meeting her for the first time over dinner.
But it was their 14 year old daughter, Emma, who struck me as being amazing in a nearly unique way. In fact, she reminded me of our sons Max and Charlie when they were that age. She is both poised and comfortable with her parents and their friend (me) and engaging in conversation, unafraid to speak her mind about anything being discussed and just remarkably well balanced for a 14 year old person.
I’d given Denise a copy of The Yes Child and later told her that there was probably nothing in it that they weren’t already doing in their relationship with Emma. So our book isn’t for people like David and Denise, who have done an exceptional job raising Emma to be the lovely, confidant young woman she is.
I think our book is more for people like Rebecca, who’s been going back and forth with her partner about starting a family and told me that until she’d read the Yes Child she “had no idea you could raise kids in the manner you describe. Both of us thought it would mean an awful ordeal, like we’d gone through as kids growing up.” Or like Sarah in Sydney, Australia, who told us she read her copy in one sitting and then passed it on to her friend who had just had her first child because she knew her friend had some reservations about her ability to raise a child intelligently and well.
Or Jo Ann, a single mother of two children who we met at a speaking event and who told us, “I don’t have time to read some tome written by a doctor about child raising, but I have time to read a book by parents, for parents.” In a follow up conversation, I asked Jo Ann if she’d read anything of value in the Yes Child and she told me no, most of what she’d read she’d already known and then proceeded to list 4 or 5 things that she planned on implementing in her parenting. Chief among those was the story we tell about not having formal, announced “sit down, family meetings” where everyone gathers around a table or in the living room at an appointed hour to discuss “family matters.”
Rather, we would talk to our children about those things by introducing them into our conversations in the car or over board games or before bed. As a child, I for one always hated the “family meeting” scenarios and if given the choice between attending a family meeting or poking my eye out with a dull stick would have headed for the woods at a dead run.
Millions of people raise great kids and I have no doubt that many of our readers could and would do so without reading the Yes Child. But I’m glad that people like Rebecca can use it to frame a new vision for raising a child, and that people like Sarah feel it has value to be shared with others and that a single mother like Jo Ann can read our brief book and take away 4 or 5 ideas that will help her with her parenting.
If you would like to share your thinking about parenting or the Yes Child, please contact us at infoATtheyeschildDOTCOM and we will be happy to engage with you that way.
Addendum- As I thought about this after posting, it seemed to me that there’s a larger issue here, at least for me. Meeting kids like Emma, Kirstin and Liam and living with Max and Charlie for so many years has given me great hope for the future. And it is both our and ,more importantly, their future and the qualities so many young people today manifest make me optimistic in a way that nothing else does.
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