Listen

by carla joy bergman

Listen introduces parents to five simple, practical skills even the most harried parent can use. These tools will help parents strengthen their connection with their child and help build their child’s intelligence, cooperation, and ability to learn as they grow. The book delivers detailed information accompanied by more than one hundred real-life stories from parents who’ve used this approach to address the root causes of their child’s difficult behaviors.

Five surprising things parents will learn:

– You don’t have to reward or punish willful children to get them to cooperate.
– Aggressive kids are frightened kids, and there are simple tools to ease their fear so they don’t need to lash out.
– Your willingness to just listen to crying or tantrums often is enough to heal a child’s fears and hurts.
– Safe play during which your kid becomes the boss can reveal his hidden feelings– and heal them too.
– Parents who regularly listen to one another’s struggles, without judging or advising, often clear so much toxic emotion that their children benefit greatly.

Paperback | 356 pages | Hand in Hand Parenting; Illustrated edition | 2016

Patty Wipfler is the mother of two sons and the Founder of the non-profit organization, Hand in Hand Parenting. The focus of her life’s work has been teaching and supporting parents. She directed The School, a non-profit parent co-operative preschool in Palo Alto, and later directed the Neighborhood Infant Toddler Center. She has led over 400 workshops for families and professionals who work with parents. In 1989, Patty founded the non-profit Hand in Hand. As Director, she wrote the “Listening to Children” series and over 60 articles on the principles and benefits of this approach to parenting. To date, Hand in Hand has sold over 800,000 copies of “Listening to Children” (now published as “Parenting by Connection”) in English, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. Patty Wipfler’s articles have been published on Huffington Post, Mothering Magazine, Nurture Magazine, the Bulletin of Zero to Three, Child Welfare News, and in many local newsletters for parents. She has been a keynote speaker at Association for the Education of Young Children conventions in Chicago and Philadelphia, and has spoken to parents around the world. Patty has two grown sons and lives in Palo Alto, California.

Tosha Schore, M.A., brings a burst of energy and optimism to parenting. She is an expert at simple solutions to what feel like overwhelmingly complicated problems. A sought after coach, author, educator, and speaker, Schore is committed to creating lasting change in families and in the world by supporting parents to care for themselves, connect with their children deeply, set limits lovingly, and play wildly. More specifically, Schore uses the five Hand in Hand Parenting tools to support parents of young boys through coaching and live virtual courses via her website (www.toshaschore.com). Her goal? To create a more peaceful world, one sweet boy at a time. Realizing that many fathers feel on the sidelines of parenting, she has recently begun gathering groups of fathers and teaching them how to support one another in their parenting, so they feel less isolated and better equipped to face the challenges of raising young ones. Schore is co-author, with Patty Wipfler, of Listen: Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges, a blogger on HuffPost Parents, and former parenting columnist for the East Bay Express. As she’s inspired, she also blogs on her own site. Schore has a multi-disciplinary background, with degrees in women’s studies (B.A., UCSC) and applied linguistics (M.A., UCLA), and certificates in adult education (UCLA) and parent education (Hand in Hand Parenting). She has combined her academic knowledge with her pragmatic, “how-to” personality, and followed her heart to find her life’s work. You can often find her reading a book or throwing a baseball with her husband and some combination of her three young boys.