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The Parenttalk Guide To Being A MumTHE PARENTTALK GUIDE TO BEING A MUM Parenttalk, an offshoot of Care for the Family, is a Christian organisation with the aim of 'inspiring parents and helping make parenthood more fun'. Their re-sources are used for both training Christians and bridge-building with non-Christians, so I was eager to read this book. Could this be what I was looking for to lend to my unbelieving toddler-group friends, to help them and challenge them with a Christian perspective on parenting? The style is conversational and extremely non-threatening, full of anecdotes, bullet-points, cartoons and highlighted Top Tips. Reading through the chapter headings is appetising also. 'Real Mums wear dribble', 'How to stop being taken for granted' and 'How do I deal with tantrums, telltales and trouble?' will win over reluctant readers and under-confident, overtired mothers. So far, so good. This approach gives some helpful hints and Janice Fixter's honesty and compassion shown in her tales of family life are a stirring example. However, this very effort to be accessible (particularly through the 'you've never seen a worse tantrum than when my . . .' style anecdote) is essentially counterproductive. With only 168 pages to contain advice on everything from birth to the empty nest, the overall impression is one of a chatty, rather distracted mum at the school gate. Janice Fixter rushes from relaying the time when little Johnny . . . to a rather vague tip. Mothers very often know what to do but are at a loss to know how to do it. Explaining 'the how' requires more thoroughness than possible in a 15-word bullet-point. Nothing on the book's cover lets the reader know that Parenttalk is a Christian organisation, and actually nothing explicitly and extremely little implicitly on the inside does either. Of course, parenting technique is emotive and divisive from the supermarket queue to the church (or especially in the church?), so the reader can applaud Parenttalk for their low key approach. But will this book really help the mums it is aimed at? After all, alongside all of the book's humour and sympathy, couldn't a little more clear biblical advice - sensitively put - really be the thing which stressed mums can hang onto? We know that Christians fail in their own parenting and have funny tales to tell, but we do after all have the perfect resource of the perfect Father, surely we can be more confident and forthright because of him? Sarah Allen© Evangelicals Now - November 2000 |