Growing with Your Child

In a warm-hearted, good-natured alternative to out-and-out instructional books about raising children, Schoen offers instead an anecdotal meditation on ``how raising children changes us, our attitudes, behavior, personality, goals, our views of ourselves and the world, subtly or dramatically, consciously and unconsciously.'' Quoting everyone from Bruno Bettelheim to Bruce Springsteen on the ``therapeutic effect'' of having and/or raising children, she offers an unabashedly, unashamedly positive view of the impact of children on parents, psychologically, spiritually and otherwise. ``Simply--although sometimes it's not so simple--realizing how our children can help us reach our full potential as people puts us well on the way to realizing our full potential as parents.'' Although at times, the book may seem too good to be true, filled with uplifting tales of parents redeemed by their kids, Schoen's cheerful and sensitive approach is hard to resist. Her accounts of transformed parents--including a wonderfully insightful look at the late writer Raymond Carver's perspective on his fatherhood--support her central argument: that ``the idea that our children provide us, as they grow, with successive opportunities that we might not otherwise have had for working through conflicts dating from when we were growing up, and thereby moving on in our personal growth, is probably as close as anyone has come to formulating a real psychodynamic of parenthood.'' (Jan.)