“I predict that this book will be the
highly accepted Dr. Spock manual for properly
raising emotionally healthy children in the 21st Century.”
— Lewis Yablonsky, Ph.D.
Book Reviews
“Being a parent is among
the most important, challenging
and complex tasks a human being has
in a lifetime, yet we come to it almost
totally unprepared, with little or no training.”
— Dr. Newmark
Reviews of the book, How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children, by:
Lewis Yablonsky, Ph.D., Sociologist
Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, Jerusalem Post
Linda L. Richards, Editor, January Magazine
Susan Norman, Co-Director of SEAL,The Society for Effective Affective Learning
Reviewed by Lewis Yablonsky, Ph.D., Sociologist
Gerald Newmark is eminently qualified to write a book that provides some basic directions and insights required for effectively socializing children. He is a parent, an educator, and a behavioral scientist who has worked with schools and youth for more than 20 years. In brief, he has been in the combat zone of parent-child relationships.
Out of the morass of psychological concepts, screaming directions for proper childcare, and religious prescriptions for bringing up Janie and Jake, Newmark has effectively culled out five critical emotional requirements that children need to have fulfilled if they are to grow up and become emotionally healthy adults. Those emotional needs are to feel respected, to feel important, to feel accepted, to feel included, and to feel secure.
In my direct work, utilizing psychodrama and group psychotherapy with psychiatric patients, criminals, and neurotics, I find Newmark’s assumptions about those five critical needs illuminate the problems we deal with in psychotherapy. It is almost axiomatic that people who become emotionally ill and/or deviant have not received the critical emotional vitamins Newmark deline-ates as necessary in the effective socialization process of their childhood.
That emotional deficiency is crystal clear in the vast 1.7 million criminal population now doing time in America’s jails and prisons. If one takes each of Newmark’s critical emotional needs in order, one can recognize that people who grow up to be criminals had, in their early years, never been respected, made to feel important, accepted (in many cases, their parents rejected them at birth), included in law-abiding society. For all of those reasons, they have had insecure feelings all their lives. Those deficiencies in their lives propelled them into lives of crime, drug addiction, and mental illness.
The issues that Newmark elaborates on in his erudite and fascinating book are very useful for diagnosing and treating a problem I have researched and worked on for almost 50 years—the violent gang problem. Youths who gravitate toward and join violent gangs are desperately searching to satisfy the critical emotional needs described by Newmark. In the gang, gangsters attempt to develop a pseudo-organization that they believe will give them some of the components of respect, acceptance, importance, and security. From my research, I have concluded that they are sucking on a dry emotional teat if they expect these needs to be met in a gang. If, as Newmark asserts, their critical needs had been fulfilled by their parents in their childhood, then they would not have been motivated to join self-and-other destructive violent gangs.
Although I recommend Dr. Newmark’s book as useful in explaining deviant behavior and a valuable book to be read by psychotherapists, it is essentially an outstanding parental cookbook for teaching average parents how to effectively raise their children to be happy, self-confident, and law-abiding citizens. In this regard, I believe the book provides an important guide for all parents. I predict that this book will be the highly accepted Dr. Spock manual for properly raising emotionally healthy children in the 21st Century.
Reprinted from The International Journal of Action Methods: Psychodrama, Skill Training, and Role Playing.
Reviewed by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich
Jerusalem Post
Parenting is Not Child's Play
A retired educator, behavioral scientist and management consultant who has a doctorate in education from the University of Southern California, Newmark didn't reinvent the wheel with this book, which was published in the wake of a stream of how-to-parent guides. But with a great deal of common sense, experience and sensitivity, he has laid down guidelines for surviving childraising with fewer tears, lifelong good relations and joy.
Newmark...was in Israel recently to mark the publication of the softcover volume in Hebrew. He and his wife Deborah were interviewed by The Jerusalem Post during Newmark's first visit to the country in 55 years.
...In the 164-page volume, the author identifies five "critical needs" that all children have: To feel respected, important, accepted, included and secure." Those needs and how to satisfy them are lessons that can be learned quckly but which take effort to implement. "Satisfying these needs," he explains, "provides a foundation for developing self-confident, independent, responsible, thinking, caring, civic-minded individuals with greater prospects for success in school, career, marriage and life in general."
Reviewed by Linda L. Richards, Editor, January Magazine
Intensive Care
You've heard it before: "Kids don't come with a manual." Which, when you think about it, is probably a good thing. Look how many people screw up repairing their washing machine or giving their car a tune up by following the instructions in a book. Even a good manual could not begin to cover the myriad mysteries of childrearing. How could it? Raising a child is a sacred undertaking. With that charge comes the responsibility for and direction of another life. I mean, go ahead: mess up fixing the dishwasher. Worst case scenario you'll end up tossing the machine and heading off to buy a new one. A pain, perhaps, but not tragedy. The risks—and potential rewards—of childrearing are much, much greater. In his warm and genuine book, How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children, author Gerald Newmark addresses these concerns directly and frankly:
Being a parent is one of the greatest joys that one can experience in life, but also one of the most difficult and anxiety-provoking responsibilities any of us will ever have. It is among the most important, challenging and complex tasks a human being has in a lifetime, yet we come to it almost totally unprepared, with little or no training. It is also apparent that once one is a parent, one is a parent forever, and frequently it doesn't get easier over time.
Newmark's answer—if we're to call it that—is not to manualize this daunting task. Rather he breaks it down into the five needs he feels that children require for emotional growth and well-being. As he writes in the introduction: My basic thesis is that all children have five critical needs that are essential to their emotional health. These are the need to feel respected, important, accepted, included, and secure. When parents understand these basic needs, recognize their importance, and treat childrearing as a professional responsibility, they can develop an overall strategy and a consistent approach to parenting.
Though that thesis is quickly explained, it takes a while longer to deal with all of the nuances that this simple paragraph implies and includes. Seven chapters help put the five critical needs in focus. Focusing also comes with the chapter titles and affirming subtitles. For instance, chapter one is called, “The Five Critical Needs of Children, (Parenting As Though Children Really Matter).” Chapter two is “Family Situations, (A Closer Look at Behavior That Helps and Behavior That Hurts).” Each subtitle helps to underline the thought and intention that applies to that particular chapter. Dr. Newmark comes to this work with all the right stuff. As a behavioral scientist, he's worked with schools and youth for over two decades and was the recipient of a presidential citation for the work he's done in education. Earlier in his career, Newmark worked under a seven year Ford Foundation grant as co-director of a project to develop a model school in the Los Angeles area. The results of that project were described in an earlier book, This School Belongs to You and Me: Every Learner a Teacher, Every Teacher a Learner. It practically goes without saying that he is also a parent. How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children feels like the culmination of a lifetime's work and learning. A slender volume that nonetheless manages to get straight to the heart of the matter. Which is, when you think about it, exactly the right place to approach this particular challenge.
Reviewed by Susan Norman, Co-Director of SEAL – The Society for Effective Affective Learning, An International Learning Community
Also published in Spanish in 2001 as Cómo Criar Niños Emocionalmente Sanos members of SEAL would almost certainly agree with almost every word in this book. Almost all of us would probably also produce exactly Gerald Newmark’s suggestions and proposals for bringing up children if we were asked to write this book. For example, if you were asked to write down a child’s five critical emotional needs (assuming they have basic food, shelter and health), what would they be? (Newmark’s list is below.)
However, I doubt that you’d be able to come up with such a wealth of practical examples, many of which might make even the most aware of us wince a little when we think of how we and others treat and have treated children. This is what growing children’s self-esteem is about. It’s a systematic non-sentimental approach to respecting children’s rights, feelings and opinions, not a bolt-on something we do once a week to try to rectify a lifetime’s hurt. It’s also about planning one’s attitude, behavior and response to children – not in a “let’s-plan-this-thing-and-take-all-the-fun-out-of-it” sort of way, but acknowledging that bringing up a child is worth at least as much planning and on-going thought as most of us put into buying a house, car or computer! The book is written for parents, and all parents would do well to read and reread it at critical times of their children’s development. So would all teachers.
Children’s five critical needs: The need to feel respected, important, accepted, included and secure.
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