Category Archives: Reason: Vine Review

Potty Training for Busy Parents by Allison Jandu

There’s nothing much new in Potty Training for Busy Parents. It’s the same old advice for how to potty train little ones with an extra emphasis on using little potties and pushing potty training younger than most people start trying. There’s a lot of repetition and it’s short and to the point. It really should be called Potty Training for Special Snowflakes, though. The repeated advice to basically demand that daycare follow how you want to potty train and to send in this weird form filled out so the daycare knows how best to train precious little junior (like they havn’t trained hundreds of kids already) is a bit over the top. I also would not say it’s for busy parents, just ones who work and have plenty of time when they aren’t at work to potty train. I suggest skipping this one if you are looking for potty training advice.

3 (out of 5) Stars
Books Read in 2021: 19
Pages Read in 2021: 5116

Discipline Your Kids with Positive Parenting by Nicole Libin, PhD

The author has one child, and that child doesn’t sound very old. The author does have a lot of experience with advising other people how to parent and extensive academic knowledge. However, academic knowledge doesn’t really give the real world experience needed for writing a parenting book.

I have always parented my kids very much like outlined in this book so she was mostly just preaching to the choir. I believe strongly that discipline should come from a place of teaching as the root indicates it should (discipulus is Latin for student or disciple). I have ten children ranging in age from 1 to 21, six of whom are adopted from foster care. Positive parenting has worked beautifully for us.

The thing is, I don’t think if I was just coming to positive parenting or was looking for help in how to parent differently that this book would be all that helpful. It was long on “just connect! it’s worked with my one single child!” and short of actual how to. I understood what she was trying to say to do simply because it’s what I do naturally.

More real world examples (it would have been okay if they came from situations where she was not the caregiver) would have been very useful. The few examples given were just her parenting her daughter. As anyone with more than one kid knows some kids are just naturally easier to parent than others so examples from one child don’t indicate at all that this way of parenting will work with all kids (I know it does, but it does take time and effort).

The constant focus on “self-care” was completely unnecessary and took away from the usefulness of the book. It repeatedly mentioned mindfulness (the author is a “mindfulness educator”) but didn’t really explain what she meant and just seemed like a bit of psychobabble and use of a buzzword.

I do not recommend this book to people who are interested in learning how to parent positively. There are many other better books on the subject out there.

2 (out of 5) Stars
Books Read in 2021: 17
Pages Read in 2021: 4721

Growing Pains by Amanda Hill, M.Ed.

Covering every year from 4 to 10, Growing Pains is a quick read on basic child development and stages. There are lots of tips for how to handle various situations that are often encountered each of those age years both in the moment and if you wait until later on to address it. The ideas in the book skew heavily to gentle discipline and positive, respectful parenting. It’s written as if you are just having a conversation with the author. It’s got a healthy dose of commiseration as well as her admitting she’s definitely not a perfect parent to her own children and sometimes needs to calm down and back up, too. There are lots of “real life” examples included. While it’s certainly not comprehensive and doesn’t cover everything you’ll encounter raising your children, many of the ideas can be adjusted to fit other situations and it definitely lets you know you are not alone wondering what in the world your kids were thinking. I highly recommend it to parents, particular those who lean toward gentle/positive parenting.

5 (out of 5) Stars
Books Read in 2021: 5
Pages Read in 2021: 1308