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Tuesday, November 20, 2012

How We Love Our Kids by Milan & Kay Yerkovich

I just finished reading How We Love Our Kids by Milan & Kay Yerkovich and let me start off by saying that I really enjoyed this book!  It was a huge eye-opener for me.  I knew my husband and I had completely different parenting styles and this book confirmed it!  The book explains the 5 love styles of parenting, but it goes much further than that.  It also explains why we parent that way, which is mostly due to the style of parenting our own parents used to parents us. 

In this book, the authors encourage us not to look at our children's behaviors, but our own.  We need to identify our personal parenting style, then work to correct those areas that need correcting in ourselves, not our children.  They have seen in their own lives how, by changing their own behaviors and reacting to our children differently than we normally would, their children's behaviors also changed.  Many of our children's less-than-lovely behaviors directly stem from how we are parenting them.  As a parent it's so easy to just pass the blame onto our kids, but the problem really does start with us.

In addition to helping us recognize our parenting style, they authors also help us to realize the effects that our particular parenting style has on our children and who they will become.  They identify several different "styles" of children such as the Avoider, the Pleaser, the Vacillator,  the Controller/Victim Child and several more.  Once we identify the types of children we have, we then can use the tips in this book to help connect to our children by understanding them better.

I think this is a great book for parents of both young and old children, as well as those who have yet to have children.  The sooner we can recognize how we parent, the sooner we can begin cultivating a more meaningful relationship with them.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for this honest review.

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