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Parenting manuals and books about child rearing abound in the modern literature of how-to and self-help. New parents can find books for almost any subject related to raising a child-from teaching sign language to a pre-verbal infant, to creating a structured behavior system for an oppositional adolescent, to scheduling time for adult activities away from the offspring. Many of these books refer to specific strategies and practices that promote functional communication and a healthy environment in which growing children can learn and thrive. Family Entanglement: Unravelling the Knots and Finding Joy in the Parent-Child Journey, written by Ellen L. K. Toronto with Robert S. Toronto, offers something new. Influenced by her training as a psychologist and psychoanalyst, Dr. Toronto writes about parenting as a memoir and philosophical guide. She explains the psychological and developmental needs of children and their parents without psychoanalytic jargon so that her meaning and personal accounts may be understood by a nonclinical audience. As such, Dr. Toronto provides an autobiographical account of how her children changed her life and how she learned to parent along the way.
Dr. Toronto begins Family Entanglement by explaining her purpose: developing a sort of field guide to communicate an approach to parenting that allows family members to build relationships that provide continual opportunities to live with authenticity and abundance. This is not a concrete, step-by-step manual designed to teach a specific skill or manage a particular developmental task; rather, it is a general guide to help the reader understand how our own human histories and early relationships affect who we are as parents as well as what parents can do to create an environment of mutuality and respect for the entire family. A focus on self-awareness and personal accountability remains a constant theme throughout the book, as Dr. Toronto frequently explains to the reader how her own childhood impact