As a psychotherapist, parent educator and parent coach, Alyson
Schäfer has worked with a great many mothers who, in the quest to
be a "good mother" have ended up on the door step of despair.
Alyson is a forty-something, suburbanite, working-mother of two and
can speak to these issues both personally and professionally.
This book explains the psycho-social phenomena of how each
person creates their own unique "good mother myth" and then
examines why these myths are not only faulty, but could in fact
lead to poor parenting, marital disaster and individual crisis. Her
years of educating parents around these concepts afford Alyson the
skill to take complex ideas and explain them to a lay audience in a
compelling and easy to understand way.
Capitalizing on the need to present parents with information in
an easy to digest format, the book is presented as a series of
personal stories, each highlighting a common parenting myth. This
format will appeal to tired parents who have little time and energy
for "academia". Instead, readers learn by taking a voyeuristic peek
into the private family lives of the book''s characters. Readers
can identify with the fictitious parents and coaching clients in
the stories and see first hand how the characters ' life
experiences shaped their unique "good mother myths" and how these
myths create conflict in their lives.
The author offers up ideas for how the character can reject her
current thinking and adopt a more useful outlook to improve her
situation. The story arc allows readers to identify and then
project how their parenting may be unknowingly going off the
rails.
The goal of this book is to provide parents with some basic
education and a means of self-discovery. Readers uncover their own
good mother myths and are given an eye-opening glimpse into
potential issues to challenge their thinking. A great sense of
empowerment is restored as mothers become better able to resist the
pulls of their personal and cultural myths, and instead begin
parenting with greater intention and in ways that are more suitable
to proper child guidance.