Jan Hunt’s The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart has a basic premise: Trust children. They may be small in size, but they deserve to have their needs taken seriously. She calls it empathic parenting: believing what we know in our heart to be true.

Peggy O’Mara, the publisher of Mothering magazine, writes in the foreword:

Jan tells it like it is. Children and adults are not different. We have the same feelings. Children who are disciplined with love respond lovingly…Children deserve to be treated with respect.

As a parent, we get conflicting messages about child-rearing. Our parents did it one way, child psychologists tell us different, school teachers have their opinion, the latest ideas in parenting are on TV, and they all disagree.

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