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Most titles on parenting focus on the impact of parenting on the developing child, but Parenting: Contemporary Clinical Perspectives is different: It focuses on the subjective experience of parenting. The book chapters interweave the experience of parenting one's own children with the experience of treating children and their parents, as well as the reverberations between the two domains. As might be expected of psychodynamically oriented clinicians, another layer of reverberations has to do with the childhood experiences of the clinicians as they resonate with current parenting, treatment relationships with children, and the work with the parents of the children.
Steven Tuber, who edited the volume, presents the core paradigm for the volume: “While we must become essential to our children as early as possible in their lives… . We must simultaneously give up this exclusive essentialness over time if we want them to develop a sense of autonomy and individuality” (p. 2). Early in life, parents are essential to children: To live, thrive, and develop, babies need the complete devotion and care of an adult who, in Brazelton's words, is “crazy about them.” It is an extraordinary experience for a parent, mother or father, to realize that they are essential for the baby, that his or her life literally depends on them. For Tuber, this is a stressful yet enlivening experience, an antidote to the inevitability of aging and death. Infants rely almost completely on their parents for survival, but before too long, their capacity for self-regulation and their developing locomotion and autonomy push them away from the parent to explore the larger world, and the feeling of being essential is challenged. This demands “weaning from being essential,” and Tuber wonders, How does the parent ride the ebb and flow of gradual diminishment of essentialness with grace? Part of the solution, he claims, is in pride: The parent is compensated for the diminishment of essentialness by the pride in