My family is super important to me. It is a priority for me and a key to a happy and healthy life. I am starting to focus more on family and relationships both professionally and personally. (I believe you can create a family if your immediate family is not your ideal or working for you.)
Related to the concept of family is my role as a mother. I want to be a “good” mother. I want to raise healthy, independent, resilient, kind, and loving adults. Being a mother is a million times harder than I ever imagined it to be yet this “role” is more important to me than any other. As most of you know, I love to read and I read a lot of self-help books. Today’s post is sharing three of my favorite and most worthwhile books on families or parenting.
The first book is, The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More by Bruce Feiler. I just finished re-reading this book for the second time and am trying to get my husband to read it too. It is the motivation for this post. I rarely re-read books but this one was worth it. I read this book about five years ago. I thought we were not ready for many of the concepts based on our boys’ ages. We are ready now, or so I hope. I also hope we are not too late. 🙂
Feiler, decided to research and interview people to learn the secrets of happy families. The topics and advice are broad and varied, from improving your mornings and how to more smoothly get out the door, to communicating with your spouse and even family reunions and allowance. I like his themes and their adaptability for various types of families. He says upfront, there is not one recipe or checklist that will give you all the answers and make everything happy / easy / “successful”, even though that is what we all want. I liked this book because he gives different ideas to TRY and that is the key. Try new ways of doing things and modify them to find what works for you. Communication and involvement from every family member is important, even, or especially the children too.
One of the recommendations from this book is to have weekly family meetings. When I tried family meetings years ago, it did not go well. The boys hated it and still strongly do not want to start them again. We are going to try. I am hopeful that they will go better now that they are older but the clear request has been made to make them fun and / or to have something fun to look forward to afterward. I will let you know how it goes.
This is more than a parenting book. It is a book about creating and nurturing a close family unit so we get along, support each other, connect and ENJOY each other. How to love each other better, communicate, and enjoy each other, and our home more. He studied and interviewed various related or some unrelated topics (like negotiation and the Green Berets) and presented best practices to apply to our families.
The other book that came to mind and stood out for me as one I would recommend, is “How to Talk so Kids Will Listen & How to Listen so Kids Will Talk” by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. This is a classic book I wish everyone would read. It is especially helpful for parents of young children and based on other more recent reading I have done, I think it applies to teenagers too. I also believe many of the concepts are helpful with adults and in the workplace, so basically it can help with everyone.
There is no one parenting manual yet there are thousands of self-help books on parenting. Many I did not think were worth my time. This one was, and I may consider re-reading it. This book has comics and illustrations to lighten it up. It asks questions and wants you to write in your answers. It gives exercises and wants you to role play. It is a bigger or more serious undertaking than a book that you just read. It is worth the time and effort. They want you to take your time with it and go through the book slowly.
You can speed through it and you will gain important information that is worthwhile but you will get even more if you take your time and do the exercises. This book taught and showed me things I did not know I was doing wrong. It gave real examples and was very specific. I won’t go into any more details. Go look it up.
These are my two top family / parenting books I would recommend. I wanted to come up with a third one and the one that came to mind was Carol S. Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I wrote about this book years ago and it still stands out for me today. I hear a lot about Growth Mindset these days, especially in schools. It is worth the hype.
Each book is very different but these are my current favorites for anyone trying to become a better parent AND have a loving, connected family which go together for me.
I would love to hear what parenting or family, or self-development books you would recommend. Please share.
I hope you are enjoying your summer. It is flying by for me.
Recent Comments