I don't know if anyone has told you this, but parenting is not always easy. Joyful, yes. Easy? No.
It turns out kids are complex little humans with big feelings and it's our job as parents, apparently, to help them learn how to navigate that--within the context of a world that often feels like it's on literal and figurative fire. As the mother of a toddler, I am always looking for inspiration for how to do this parenting thing better (and also seeking a bit of comfort and encouragement), and I found both in several new titles that both challenge and reassure.
I was excited to pick up the new book from Instagram parenting personality Dr. Becky. In the introduction to Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be (Harper Wave, $28.99), Becky Kennedy promises that with the approach outlined in her book, "parents can do better on the outside and feel better on the inside. They can strengthen their relationship with their child and see improved behavior and cooperation." It sounds too good to be true, in a way, but ever a lover of nuance and seeing beyond binary solutions to complex problems, I dove right in--and found tactics that offer as much healing for myself as advice for how to parent my young child. We're all, Kennedy says, "good inside," and assuming the best--of ourselves, of our kids, of anyone we interact with--can go a long way to changing how we respond to difficult situations.
As a white parent to a white child, I've also given much thought to what it means to raise a kid who is not only good inside, but who can demonstrate that by standing up for what is good everywhere. To that end, I picked up Dr. Traci Baxley's Social Justice Parenting: How to Raise Compassionate, Anti-Racist, Justice-Minded Kids in an Unjust World (Harper Wave, $27.99), written for the "fellow parent who wants to cultivate more love and a sense of belonging in the world, starting in your own home." I'm also forever recommending Courtney Martin's Learning in Public (Little, Brown, $18.99) to other parents considering questions of education and community care in our individual parenting decisions.
Erin S. Lane considers that role of our own homes in Someone Other than a Mother: Flipping the Script on a Woman's Purpose and Making Meaning Beyond Motherhood (Tarcherperigree, $26). The subtitle says a lot about what the book examines: the role of mothers in modern society, particularly through the messages received from pervasive Christian teachings in the United States. Lane is, in many ways, grappling with how to do as Baxley suggests: cultivate love and belonging in the world when she has no desire to birth children of her own. With big questions about community care, legacy and what it means to make a family, Someone Other than a Mother is a tribute to the many ways we can all mother, regardless of whether or not we meet the rigid definitions of what that word might mean to others--or what we thought it meant to ourselves. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer