Raising Human Beings
By Ross W. Greene, Ph.D.
These days, the guidance on how to raise kids is so ubiquitous and so incongruous that it’s hard to know what’s right and wrong, what’s important and what’s not, what to prioritize and what to let slide, and how best to respond when a child isn’t meeting expectations. Parents feel pressured to prepare their kids for the harsh realities of The Real World while also allowing them to explore who they are and forge their own path, all against the backdrop of daily struggles with homework, hygiene, social media, and the peer culture. It’s easy to lose perspective on the most important goal of parenting: raising a human being.
In Raising Human Beings, Dr. Greene helps parents maintain the balance between helping kids figure out who they are – their skills, preferences, beliefs, values, personality, goals and direction – and ensuring that kids benefit from parents’ experience, wisdom, and values. His collaborative, non-punitive, non-adversarial approach helps parents reduce conflict, enhance parent-child communication, and forge a partnership with their kids, and also helps foster skills on the more positive side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one’s behavior is affecting others, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another’s perspective, and honesty. This much-anticipated book was released in August, 2016.