Parenting from the Heart offers a new and different, refreshing approach to parenting. This easy-to-understand, down-to-earth book moves beyond parenting theories and techniques to get to the heart of parenting. If parents know how to look within their hearts to find the answers they need, parenting techniques are not necessary. If parents know how to find a loving connection with their children at most times, discipline and consequences are rarely necessary. All parents have it within them to bring out the best in their children. Approaching parents in this way makes parenting a true pleasure, instead of the battle and chore it often becomes. Many so-called experts say that raising kids is the toughest job any of us will ever do, but it does not have to be that way. It can be the most joyful thing any of us will ever do. Parenting from the Heart is a must resource for anyone who cares about parenting and raising children.

I can't tell you how you have impacted my life. I have taught parenting courses for four years, and when I get up in the morning I now think about treating my kids in a gentle, lighthearted spirit, and it works! The rest just falls into place. The stress of providing care for eight kids and a husband's Monday-Friday commute takes it's toll, but I'm learning to pay attention to my thinking and go back to calm and the love returns . . . Thank you for writing this book. It is very dynamic and has provided me with a sense of freedom.

Jack Pransky, Ph.D. is Director of the Northeast Health Realization Institute and is an international consultant and trainer for the prevention of problem behaviors and the promotion of well-being. He also authored the books, Prevention: The Critical Need (1991; 2001), Modello: A Story of Hope for the Inner-City and Beyond, (1998), and co-authored the Healthy Thinking, Feeling, and Doing--from the Inside-Out (2000) violence prevention curriculum and guide. Pransky has worked in the field of prevention since 1968 in a wide variety of capacities. He has offered parenting training and consultation to a great number of parents, and has trained many parenting course instructors.

This puzzled me.

Me, not understand kids?! Me? Had I not devoted my entire life to preventing problems among young people? I even wrote a book about it! Had I not run many parenting courses, and trained many parenting instructors? More important, did I not have what I considered to be a good relationship with my own daughter?

"Jaime, what do you mean by that?" I asked.

"You just don't."

Not overly helpful! But I did want to understand. My daughter could not articulate it. She had only a vague feeling.

I did see Jaime taking less and less responsibility. If anything went wrong she would always blame someone or something else. She always had an excuse. She began to treat her mother with contempt. We also saw Jaime becoming increasingly unhappy. This concerned us deeply, for we seemed powerless to do anything about it.

Then, one day, Jaime had a breakthrough. She had been too close to see it.

It began the night she stayed over at a friend's house, after her friend had attended a huge party and had not bothered to inform her parents. Jaime watched the mother confront her friend about misrepresenting her whereabouts and not coming home when expected. The mother said they had given her a certain amount of trust and freedom. It was a big deal to let a fourteen-year-old go to a party, and she should have shown her parents more respect.

Jaime watched her friend completely shut her mother out, not listening to anything she said. Jaime could relate. Her friend had heard her mother say such things a hundred times, and it had stopped registering. Instead of taking in its truth her friend got snotty and angry and yelled, "You don't understand anything!"

It looked all too familiar. Observing it from a distance, not caught up in the emotions, not feeling threatened, Jaime realized that she too had a tendency to react in the same way whenever a power figure loomed over her. To Jaime, her friend's mother made a lot of sense. Trust was at stake! Her friend's parents needed to know what her friend was up to. How else would they know whether to stay up until she had arrived home safely, whether she had stayed over at someone's house, or whether she'd been raped and was lying somewhere in a gutter.

Jaime could relate to the feeling. Whenever her own parents got on her case about anything, rather than listen she would be scrambling, trying to figure out what she could say to protect herself, blocking out the words, saying over and over to herself, "This is so stupid! This is so stupid!"

Jaime thought, "It must be something about the way all parents come across: 'This-is-the-way-it's-going-to-be-and-if-it's-not-here's-what-will-happen.' But in the end kids make their own decisions anyway, no matter what their parents say."

The next day, at our own house, Jaime's mother, Judy, came in exhausted from a hard day's work to find that Jaime had a lot of friends over and had basically trashed the house.

"Jaime, I can't believe you could do this!" Judy snapped.

Jaime felt herself tuning out from her mother as her friend had. She could pick up the slightest edge in a tone of voice miles away--long before her mother even noticed it herself. Jaime's antennae were way up. She would be waiting to pounce whenever she heard a tone change, which invariably resulted in the butting of heads and a fight.

No one veered from their positions. In the middle of the argument, it occurred to Judy that they were having a power struggle; that Jaime was trying to assert her power and Judy’s own power was holding it back. She attempted to express this to Jaime, but Jaime didn't hear it as intended.

So frustrated and red-faced it looked like she would burst, Jaime yelled, "I hate you! I hate you! I love you because you're my mother, but I hate you!"

Judy was at wit's end.

"It's not like it was!" Jaime cried. "You don't hold me any more and tell me you love me like you used to. You're just on my case. You just come in and say how disappointed you are in me, how I let you down. I can't live up to your expectations of me!"

"What do you want me to do?" Judy replied. "Is it too much to expect for you not to add to my burden when I come home?"

At this point Jaime grabbed her head and let out a scream. "AAAUUUGHHH! I can't stand it anymore!"

I was sitting on the other side of the room watching all this. (I do not mean to suggest that I came riding in on a white horse here; Judy has bailed me out on many an occasion.) However, as I was not personally involved in the conversation--as detached as Jaime had been with her friend--I was not the one feeling threatened, causing my guard to be up. So while Judy saw this as an issue of power, I heard something else.

"Wait," I said, "the point isn't power. The point is love. Jaime is saying that we could tell her to do anything, so long as we say it with love and understanding."

Jaime nodded through her tears. No matter what we told her it could be communicated in a nonaccusatory way--in a loving way. I realized that if love isn't being felt in the moment, only then do issues of power come into play.

Judy then had a breakthrough. "Oh, you mean it's not what I say, it's how I say it?"

We could say, "Jaime, honey, would you mind picking this up please," instead of "How could you do this!" and have her take it as a personal affront.

Jaime said, "Even when you're mad--especially around little things, like if you leave your light on, it should be, like, 'Jaime, honey, you left your light on,' or saying it with a smile on your face. Things get across to kids better that way. Because it doesn't really matter in the whole scheme of things. It can bug you, but it can bug you in a happy way, as opposed to, 'Why don't you ever do that right!'"

My God, she is right! She is so right!

It's the key to it all.

I was even writing about it, and I didn't see it under my nose. I understood it on an intellectual level but had not connected it in my heart. Of course I knew this, but knowing it intellectually means nothing.

Our daughter helped us see that this is the only thing that really counts in parenting. It's the cake; everything else is the icing. What our kids feel from us in the moment is the only thing that really matters.

This goes for our own kids, as well as the kids we work with or teach.

It must go beyond intellectual understanding--to the heart.

We can see it in those who work best with kids; we can see it in the teachers that students love. Such individuals naturally create a loving, supportive, lighthearted feeling. Teenagers, children, feel it from them. This is why they are so good with kids and help them have breakthroughs in understandings.

In a sense it does not even matter what we say. It's what our children feel coming out of us toward them from our hearts.

Every day I thank my lucky stars for this breakthrough. At ages sixteen and seventeen Jaime was an absolute delight to be around, to have around. We developed the most wonderful, warm, loving relationship. By her senior year people kept commenting to us about how happy and self-assured she always seemed to be.

In sum, here is the essence of what is being said: If we want our children to both respond to us well and live a life of well-being, they must live in a loving feeling. The number one-most-important-by-far-bar-none thing that we can do for our children is to create a loving, supportive, caring, respectful, lighthearted environment. And we don't need to know any parenting techniques to do it.

Of course we know this! This is not new news. But there is one catch: A loving environment is a moment-to-moment thing.

What?

The feeling we have at the time is the environment that the child is living in at that moment.

When we feel angry, our children are living in an angry environment. When we feel scared, our children are living in a fearful environment. When we feel disappointed our children are living in an environment of, "I-can't-live-up-to-their-expectations." No matter what we try to communicate to them at those times the feeling we have inside us is what they pick up, the environment that surrounds them at that moment. If we are fearful or anxious or worried or angry or disappointed or any number of emotions, our children are not living in a loving, caring, supportive, environment at those times--even if we generally show love to our children and tell them many times a day that we love them. If we think they are, we are kidding ourselves.