Product Review

There are a million parenting books on the market claiming to have the secrets to turning your children into the smartest, happiest, hippest, best nourished, fittest, most attractive, best behaved, and the list goes on. They offer a never-ending litany of often-conflicting advice about everything from breastfeeding to types of discipline to how to get your kid into the Ivy Leagues. It’s enough to make any new parent sob with frustration.

It’s easy—and common—to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of opportunities there are to screw up, and never have these opportunities been more widespread than in twenty-first century America. The fact is, parenting can be hard to navigate, and there are definitely some wrong ways to go about it, but it’s also the most fun, exciting, rewarding experience you’ll ever have, and, despite the constant worry (we can’t do anything to make that go away, unfortunately), you should be enjoying the unique opportunity to be the parent of your children.

The purpose of this book entitled The Ultimate Guide To Parenting: How To Raise Children Without Screwing Them Up by author Britney Watkins is to help you see through the myths and the outright lies that a complicated cultural web has tossed at you and to help you make confident decisions about how you raise your children.

The information in this book will bring you through each stage of child development—infancy, toddlerhood, preschool, grade school, and adolescence with useful information on how children’s brains develop, an overview of the parenting and real life anecdotes that illustrate what the heck we’re talking about. Between each of the main chapters, we’ll address relevant topics that parents often find themselves in a quandary over: What does self-esteem actually mean? How do I deal with the judgment of my peers? What is the most effective way to listen to my children? Is it selfish of me to take time off from my kids? I chose to have children, so is it okay to ask for help from other people? Why is letting go so hard?

This book doesn’t aim to teach you how to raise the perfect child—no child is perfect, and you won’t be either. The simple aim of this book is to inform you of the things you can do, or not do, to raise them without screwing them up.