Rebecca Walker on Instinctive Parenting

by Ada Calhoun Oct 26, 2010

Rebecca Walker, author of Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, said something super nice about Instinctive Parenting (the book and the concept) in a recent interview:

[On parenting books] I threw them all away. They were all useless. Initially I was really into the attachment parenting books, but my son's temperament was just never that. He never wanted to go into the wrap, snuggly thing. He was just always demanding his independence and reaching for it so it didn't really work. And it also made me very tired. And then at some point, I just had to let go of everybody else's ideas of how to raise my kid and just try to tune into who he is and listen to his father and his feelings about it, more than any book. Though I do like Ada Calhoun's book, Instinctive Parenting. It's basically, just give them some love. Our hyper fixation on providing the perfect thing, which I spent the first three years of Tenzin's life obsessed with, is not necessarily best for their long term well-being.