Book review – Parenting for Humans by Dr Emma Svanberg
Parenting for Humans is not, like many parenting books, about your child. Instead, it’s described as ‘a book for you as a parent’. It helps you to see that whatever you know or have read, you bring your emotions and experiences to your parenting.
Dr Emma Svanberg (aka the Mumologist), is an award-winning clinical psychologist, who works with parents, parents-to-be and professionals focusing on how to understand yourself so you can live a more fulfilling life.
Dr Svanberg helps us see how we’ve created a fantasy parent since our own childhoods, with fantasy children, and reminds us that we all tell ourselves stories about parenting.
Lots of us start our parenting journey with some ideas about the things we want to do, and the ways we want to be. And often this is a mixture of the things we remember fondly from childhood, and those which we promised ourselves our children would never experience, perhaps with some bits mixed in from parenting we’ve seen around us, on TV, in books or on social media.
But soon we realise the story we’ve told ourselves is a fantasy, not reality – real parents and real children are unique, complex and messy, not like the ones in books, sitcoms or carefully crafted social media posts.
Parenting for Humans helps you to unravel your story. It helps you move away from the idea that if you’re finding parenting hard, it’s because you or your child are broken... and reminds you that it's because being a parent is hard.
Everyone who reads or listens to this book (there’s an audio book version too) will take something different from it, because what Dr Svanberg helps you to do is explore the stories you brought to parenthood.
She helps you to look at these, and understand them, so you can "parent the child you have as the person you are" – which means everyone who reads the book will, as Dr Svanberg puts it “find a way that’s uniquely yours”.
And this isn’t only a book for parents with young children. It could be one to share with grandparents or other relatives who might have a whole mixture of stories about parenting and grandparenting that they are bringing to their new role.
We were thrilled to have Dr Svanberg as a guest on an episode of the My First Five Years podcast, click here to listen to the episode for free. You can buy Parenting for Humans at your local bookshop, or on Amazon using the link below.
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