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For a number of years Dr. Bettelheim conducted meetings with a group of young parents to discuss the everyday problems they encountered in caring for their children. This volume contains a representative sample of transcriptions of these discussions. Included are such diverse problems as when should a child be weaned from the bottle; what to do with a three-year-old girl who still wets herself; how much and when should a pacifier be used?
The author avoids the parents' persistent efforts to draw him into giving advice or theories of child care. Rather, he seeks to teach them how to think about the problems and how to ask meaningful questions. He feels that once this has been accomplished the solution to the problem will usually be self-evident. This is quite an expectation, since the task of teaching people to think and to ask fruitful questions is formidable in itself. It is not surprising then that Dr. Bettelheim falls far short of this ambitious mark.
One of the major guideposts for parents in these dialogues is the question, 'Why would I do this?', which underscores the utility of the parents' empathy in understanding the child. A second, related question, 'Are they so different?', is concerned with the tendency of some adults to view the functioning and motivations of the child as if they were different from their own and had a correspondingly simpler texture. A third question is, 'What kind of child do you want?'. Apart from some trivial applications of this query, the author offers the complicated and subtle thesis that varying continua of gratification, frustration, and prohibition will tend to produce