The motherhood constellation

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Diane Eyer

Mothers today feel guilty. The parenting and women's magazines ask you to weigh how your job affects your child. Employers blame you for taking family time. Politicians blame you for the decline of "family values." Do mothers really deserve all this blame? In her provocative new book, Motherguilt, psychologist Diane Eyer probes the origins of this culture of blaming mothers - and encouraging them to blame themselves. She asserts that it is the very sources of parenting advice to which mothers turn for help that make them feel guilty. In fact, parenting experts and social scientists provide the foundation for the growing chorus of motherblame. Writing with scholarship, passion, and wit, Dr. Eyer argues that scapegoating mothers for society's ills is merely a convenient smoke screen for the real culprit: the national neglect of children and our utter failure to provide a national child-care program. This revolutionary book champions mothers against the bogus accusations of science and politics and paves the way for refocusing our concern on our nation's children.

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Denis Wood and Robert J. Beck

"What is home for a child," ask Denis Wood and Robert Beck, "but a field of rules?" And in these mundane "dos and don'ts," they contend, are carried our deepest beliefs and values, our generational memories and cultural heritage. In Home Rules Wood and Beck undertake a remarkable exploration of the "built environment" and our relationship to it. Their objective is to explore and understand a specific room - the living room at 435 Cutler Street, the home of Denis and Ingrid Wood and their children, Randall and Chandler. But ultimately their search is for an understanding of every room as an institution, a cultural creation centered on fundamental human needs, activities, and beliefs. In its narrowest sense, then, Home Rules is a case study of a particular family's life in a particular room. Based on Beck's interviews with each member of the Wood family, the book identifies 223 rules addressing safety, behavior, and treatment of the room's seventy objects. A tour of the room proceeds object by object - screen door, door, doorframe, window in the door - with each object presented first in its physical form with a photograph and description, then in terms of the rules that govern its use or treatment, and finally in light of the values and meanings that surround it ("What are the walls that one should not put one's hands on them?"). In their description and analysis, Wood and Beck show how every room we inhabit is much more than an architectural construct. As the manifestation of meanings and values - conveyed to children as spoken rules - the room is part of the larger network of rules and customs that exist for all people in their domestic environments. By "living the room" with our children, we introduce them to a way of life, a system of beliefs, and a manner of dealing with any environment or place. Ultimately, the authors conclude, a room is a memory. It stores in the arrangement of its parts how we sit together and interact. It holds for children the memory of rooms in which their parents grew up, which in turn were memories of other, more distant rooms, and so on across the generations

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Edward Hoffman

The Kabbalah is Judaism's intriguing mystical tradition, thousands of years old. Though Jewish mysticism fell into obscurity for much of the industrial age, since the 1960s it has begun flowering once again throughout the world. In recent years, a growing number of people - both Jews and non-Jews - are finding the Kabbalah to be a fascinating treasure house of wisdom about the human mind. Men and women are discovering and applying Jewish mystical insights in daily life, and professionals in such fields as psychology, psychotherapy, and medicine are actively using Kabbalah in their work. Opening the Inner Gates is an up-to-date anthology concerning these new explorations. In sixteen chapters, thirteen contributors present both theoretical considerations and applied methods of Kabbalah in such areas as healing, the mind-body relationship, dreamwork, intuition and creativity, storytelling, women's spirituality, parenting, working with the elderly, and "repairing the world" (tikkun olam).

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John Sommers-Flanagan, Rita Sommers-Flanagan

Embracing the uniqueness of every parent, family situation, and practitioner, How to Listen so Parents Will Talk and Talk so Parents Will Listen helps professionals address the parent-child problems that families often find puzzling or challenging and for which they seek support and guidance. How to Listen so Parents Will Talk and Talk so Parents Will Listen features many specific interventions and methods for helping parents implement developmentally appropriate and scientifically supported strategies for building healthy parent-child relationships and working through the most common conflicts encountered in families.