Books Like “Dear Mr. Henshaw

If you enjoyed Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary, you likely appreciate Parent and child, Letters, Schools. These similar reads match the tone, themes, and audience of the original.

Parent and childLettersSchoolsDivorceJuvenile fictionFictionNewbery MedalParent-child relationship
Cover of Parent-child relations

Parent-child relations

Jerry J. Bigner, Clara J. Gerhardt

1979

Now in the Ninth Edition, Jerry Bigner's "Parent-Child Relations," the classic resource for child development professionals and parents themselves, has undergone a thorough revision anchored by the vision of the late Dr. Bigner and executed by new co-author, Clara Gerhardt.Maintaining its fundamental structure and unique approach, the text uses family systems and systemic family development theory as a framework to explore how parent-child relations change in tandem with developmental changes occurring with children, adults, and the wider family system. Thoughtful updates and revisions were done to increase the effectiveness and currency of the text. The text continues to provide strong emphasis on various theoretical and practical models pertaining to parenting. For decades now, this classic text has prepared countless teachers and practitioners by its proven and practical approach, utilizing family systems and systemic family development theory to explore how parent-child relations change in tandem with developmental changes occurring with children, adults, and the wider family system. The most comprehensive and current resource available to students as they prepare for working with parents and families, and for their roles as parents themselves, this best-selling resource carries on the essential message of its originator, Dr. Jerry Bigner, and will continue to nurture future family scholars and practitioners for years to come.

Cover of Toughlove

Toughlove

Phyllis York

1980

How do you love an “impossible” teenager? “An effective way of uniting parents to square off against the youngsters’ own powerful peer group that endorses drugtaking and rebelliousness.”—Time Thousands of parents are finding new hope in dealing with rebellious teenagers through Toughlove, a self-help program which has grown to over eight hundred groups throughout the United States and Canada in less than six years. Now, for the first time in book form, the founders tell how Toughlove works. “You need Toughlove if you feel helpless and unable to cope with your teenagers’ behavior or if you feel victimized by them, disappointed in yourself as a parent, guilty because you think you have done a rotten job and are frightened bythe potential for violence in yourself and your children. . . . Remember, you have the right to a night’s sleep without where your kid is—or being awakened by a phone call from the police or a hospital or a drunk teenager who’s stranded somewhere.”—Ann Landers

Cover of Das Drama des begabten Kindes und die Suche nach dem wahren Selbst

Das Drama des begabten Kindes und die Suche nach dem wahren Selbst

Alice Miller

1979

The “drama” of the gifted—i.e., sensitive, alert—child consists of his recognition at a very early age of his parents' needs and of his adaptation to those needs. In the process, he learns to repress rather than to acknowledge his own intense feelings because they are unacceptable to his parents. Although it will not always be possible to avoid these “ugly” feelings (anger, indignation, despair, jealousy, fear) in the future, they will split off, and the most vital part of the “true self” (a key phrase in Alice Miller's works) will not be integrated into the personality. This leads to emotional insecurity and loss of self, which are revealed in depression or concealed behind a facade of grandiosity.Alice Miller defines the ideal state of genuine vitality, of free access to the true self and to authentic individual feelings that have their roots in childhood, as “healthy narcissism.” Narcissistic disturbances, on the other hand, represent for her solitary confinement of the true self within the prison of the false self. This is regarded less as an illness than as a tragedy.The examples Alice Miller presents make us aware of the child's unarticulated suffering and of the tragedy of parents who are unavailable to their children—the same parents who, when they were children, were available to fill their parents' needs. In her psychoanalytical work, Dr. Miller found that her patients' ability to experience authentic feelings, especially feelings of sadness, had been for the most part destroyed; it was her task to help her patients try to regain that long-lost capacity for genuine feelings that is the source of natural vitality. Many people who have read her books have discovered within themselves for the first time in their lives the little child they once were. This may explain the unusually strong and deep reactions Alice Miller's books have evoked in so many readers from different countries. The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self is the origina

Cover of Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh

1945

Evelyn Waugh's beloved masterpiece, with an introduction by Paula Byrne The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognise his spiritual and social distance from them. 'Lush and evocative ... Expresses at once the profundity of change and the indomitable endurance of the human spirit' The Times

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