How Children Raise Parents: The Art of Listening to Your Family Book

Parents put their confidence in rules and principles and apply themselves to doing everything right. They believe that diligent application of the right methods will protect their kids from threatening influences and will assure that their kids succeed. But rather than building a healthy parent/child relationship, the rules-oriented approach places unreasonable demands and expectations on both parents and children. And the added pressure makes it more difficult for a child to feel loved by his parents - and by God.

To reduce pressure and enjoy greater closeness, parents need to turn their approach upside-down by allowing God to use their children to lead them to spiritual maturity. How Children Raise Parents provides a bold new paradigm by showing that parenting is the process God uses to help parents grow up. This liberating approach helps parents learn to prize what they're being taught by their child's quirks, failures, and normal childhood dilemmas, rather than worrying about what their children will accomplish in life.

Library Journal

Allender's overtly Christian take on parenting is both passionate and personal, but his preachiness and uneven narration overwhelm any valuable points he raises. Allender (The Wounded Heart) devotes considerable time to waxing on the blessings and travails of parenting as well as the artificiality of imposing parental rule systems on children. As an audio experience, this is the equivalent of listening to the author wonder aloud whether to overprotect his kids or, conversely, to tag-and-release them into the wild. The topic of exactly how kids "raise" parents is avoided much of the time in favor of exhorting parents to empathize with and understand their children. Though zealous, Allender makes for a particularly poor narrator; he speaks rapidly in a soft voice that quickly becomes monotonous. There are many faith-based parenting books (like those of William and Martha Sears) available in audio, as well as Thomas W. Phelan's more mainstream classic 1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12. Recommended only for Christian collections.-Douglas C. Lord, Connecticut State Lib., Hartford Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.