Hold On To Your Kids

The most important parenting book I've read thus far. Highly recommend for parents of young children especially (I'm glad I have it while my kids are little), but certainly pertinent for parents of teens.

This book was a great reminder that we should value family time and spend time with our children even when society makes you believe that you should sign them up for every team, skill, enrichment activity. They need time with their family...and we need time with them. Life's greatest gift and currency is time.

this book blew my mind! so good for parents in any stage of life.

I gave 4 stars because of the small prints. It makes it hard for me to read the book though I have a good eye vision. Other than that I love the book and it's very informative and eye opening for me. I only read 30% of the book and struggling to finish it. But still hard..

Love this book

Eye opening about parenting and our society

This book will transform the way we as parents view our children. It will change the way we interact with them. Vital reading for any parent, grandparent or teacher.

Ever wonder why it's so difficult to parent today? Why none of the techniques taught in books on how to raise a child (natural consequences, negative consequences, and/or rewards) seem to work today? Why bullying is so widespread compared to the past? Both authors espouse the reasons of all these phenomena with arguments that seem counterintuitive to the average parent (that's why the negative reviews like the one that said that the consequences of the evil experiment imposed on us by the covid lock down is evidence that the theories illustrated in this book are not valid). The authors don't exhort parents to lock down their kids so they don't have any contact with their peers. In fact, they said that if a child is NOT "peer oriented" but primarily connected to his parents, those interactions are very good for kids. The authors also refute the impetus way too precocious in our American society to force our children to become independent at an early age. In fact as soon as during the toddler years, we push our kids to become independent. We separate from our babies by putting them in daycare soon after being born (really an experiment that is perpetrated here in USA). Then they go to school for many hours, eat lunch there without their family but with other peers, after school activities etc... The solution: We need to bring our children back to full dependence on us, not only physical but emotional and psychological to gain our parenting power back as nature intended. Unfortunately many parents are present for their children physically but not emotionally because they're preoccupied by the stresses of their lives. My son was diagnosed with ADHD and we had to withdraw him from school because of the bullying by his teacher and his school mates. The ultimatum was clear: put him on medications or take him out. I don't like to do what is the easiest thing (against my son interest) so I started to look for alternatives and thus I had to educate myself and my husband first. The level of stress in our house was inimaginable due to our son's recalcitrance, disobedience and oppositional behavior. My husband wanted to implement the easy way out: drugs and corporal punishment. But they didn't work. So he thought he had to increase the harshness of the punishments: didn't work. This book is so incredible because it explains that these harsh punishments actually erode our relationships with our children thus making their behavior worse. Our objective is to "collect" the child, we need to entice her to be in relationship with us, because they have a natural and instinctual need to depend and rely on us, to feel UNCONDITIONALLY loved. They need our attention, stability, presence and advice. The lack of these things will impel them to get their needs satisfied by their peers to fill the attachment void, which cannot ever be filled in this way. For the people who said there are only 2 sentences that make sense in this book, I say: good luck with the current culture that wants our children to be popular, cool or else.