Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves, by Naomi Aldort (review)

Respect, authenticity, and logic. Those are the three key ingredients to raising a healthy, happy, and productive child as I heard them in reading this book. Aldort presents a lot of good points and great suggestions here, but it wouldn't be a parenting book if it didn't come across as a little self-indulgent and didn't have some kind of agenda. For Aldort, who actually either falsified her credentials or is the biggest dope on the planet (source), the agenda begins with attachment parenting and moves smoothly into gentle parenting. That sounds good, but there's a heavy dose of parental guilt thrown in, and many of her expectations felt downright unrealistic to me. That, and the supposedly real dialogue is incredibly stilted. I did take a lot away from this book, but I was looking to it for general guidance and rough ideas, not as a parenting bible.