Book SummaryThe Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, by Philippa Perry

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read

Do you want to cultivate a healthy relationship with your child? Do you wish you had the tools to understand them better? In The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, Philippa Perry offers guidance for strengthening your bonds with your child and raising an emotionally secure individual. She argues that you can improve your parent-child relationship no matter your child’s age by examining how your parents’ style of parenting impacts your own, listening to your child, and meeting them with respect and understanding.

Perry is a British psychotherapist, writer, and TV and radio presenter. She worked in the...

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read Summary Developing Your Parent-Child Relationship

According to Perry, you shouldn’t view a child as someone to manage, but rather as an individual with whom you plan to maintain a close bond for the rest of your life. Maintaining this bond full of love and connection requires you to regularly confront your emotions, understand how your past affects your present, and recognize how your actions affect your child.

Characteristics of a Strong Bond Between Parent and Child

According to some parenting experts, the following are characteristics of a strong parent-child relationship:

**1) Showing your child that you love them...

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read Summary Addressing How Your Upbringing Affects Your Parenting

Perry argues that your upbringing affects how you relate to your child. Emotions related to any harm your parents caused you will probably return in your experiences raising your child. This happens when your child’s actions remind you of something you did or experienced around the same age. You’ll likely relive the emotions you felt when your parents didn’t give you the attention, love, or support you needed when you exhibited the same behavior.

(Shortform note: You may not only feel emotionally triggered by your child’s behaviors that remind you of your own behavior as a child. You may also experience strong emotions when they exhibit behaviors that directly mirror how your parents acted when you were young. For example, if your parents often yelled at you growing up, you might respond with aversion, fear, or anger if your child raises their voice at you. Additionally, everyone involved in raising your child will be triggered by different things because...

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read Summary Understanding Attachment Styles

Perry argues that another important aspect of developing a strong, lifelong parent-child bond is helping your child form the right attachment style. According to attachment theory, babies are born with the ability to bond with other humans, and they take their cues for how to do this from their parents. The way their parents interact with them in this early stage of life—when they’re learning how bonds are formed—determines how they’ll relate to others throughout their lives.

(Shortform note: Attachment theory was first developed by psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes how Bowlby studied maladjusted and orphaned children in post-World War II Europe. He found that love was paramount to a child’s development. Children who’d been deprived of the love of a parent because of the war struggled to form healthy relationships. They were either cold and distant or tended to form close attachments to anyone who showed them the slightest attention.)

When you’re consistently offered...

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read Summary Teaching Your Child to Acknowledge and Name Their Emotions

According to Perry, recognizing, naming, and respecting your child’s emotions is a key way to form a strong bond with them and raise them to be mentally healthy individuals. By doing this, you teach them how to understand, regulate, and express their emotions in a healthy way, which is an important part of their development.

(Shortform note: The practice of noticing a child’s emotions and using them as opportunities for teaching and intimacy is called emotion coaching. Years of research suggest that children are healthier and more successful in all aspects of life when their parents employ this technique with them. If you want to start emotion coaching, consider using specific prompts that validate and soothe your child's emotions—you can find numerous examples online.)

The Different Ways We Deal With Emotions

Perry states that...

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read Summary Making Amends When You Make a Mistake

Perry argues that, though you should strive for the emotional stability and empathy displayed in the above strategies, being a good parent isn’t about behaving perfectly all the time. You’ll occasionally react in an unhelpful way, hurt your child’s feelings, or misunderstand your child. What’s most important for your parent-child relationship is that you acknowledge your imperfections and make amends for the harm you cause.

Some people think that to feel safe, a child needs to believe their parents don’t make mistakes. However, this belief is faulty—children need you to model honesty and humility for them, not perfection. If you act as if you’re always right and never acknowledge your mistakes, you risk making your child feel like you don’t care about their feelings or that they’re responsible for your moods.

Your child’s intuition will likely tell them when you’re wrong, but your refusal to acknowledge it will make them question the validity of their feelings, increasing the likelihood that they’ll suppress them later. This may negatively affect the way they relate to other people, leading them to accommodate other people’s needs over their own.

**Why You Shouldn’t...

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read Summary Assessing How You Speak About Yourself

According to Perry, the way you speak to yourself has a big impact on your child’s relationship with themself. Children model their behavior on the behavior of their parents, so if you tend to speak negatively about yourself, your child will likely develop that behavior as well.

For example, say you have an inner belief that you’re not very smart. Even if it’s not true, it makes you feel deeply insecure. Therefore, anytime someone compliments you for your cleverness or skills, you make a self-deprecating comment diminishing your intelligence. Likewise, anytime you make a mistake, you take it as evidence that confirms your self-assessment.

You don’t treat or think of your child the same way, so you don’t think about how your comments about yourself affect them. However, over time, you might notice they stop trying very hard in school, they’re afraid to make mistakes, or they frequently minimize their intelligence. By watching you put yourself down, they’ve learned to do the same.

(Shortform note: Some psychologists assert that you should [think of your child as if they’re an...

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read Summary Modeling Healthy Conflict Resolution

Just as it’s important to teach your child to interact with themselves in a healthy way, Perry argues that it’s important to teach them how to treat others, especially during conflicts. It’s inevitable that there will sometimes be conflicts in a household, whether between two parents, between a parent and a child, or between two other people. Having conflicts isn’t inherently an issue—it’s the way you approach these disputes that matters.

Conflict resolution has a large effect on your child’s feelings of security and safety. If conflicts are consistently handled in nonconstructive, dysfunctional ways, a child may feel emotionally insecure in their home space—unable to relax because they never know when the next conflict will happen. As they’re always on alert, they may find it hard to be open and curious when interacting with the rest of the world.

How Handling Conflict Predictably Helps Children

Resolving conflict predictably makes a child feel emotionally and physically safe, according to Nathaniel Branden in *[The Six Pillars of...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on a Past Parenting Experience

Reflect on how you could have applied Perry’s advice to a parenting experience from your past so you’ll feel ready to apply her insights to similar situations in the future.

Describe a parenting challenge that you wish you’d handled differently, or describe a childhood experience of being parented that you wish your parents had handled differently. (For example, maybe your child cried because you wouldn’t buy a toy, and you snapped at them for being ungrateful. Or, maybe your parents never disagreed in front of you, so now you have no idea how to solve conflicts with your partner.)