Raising Mentally Strong Kids, Daniel G. Amen, MD and Charles Fay, PhD. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Refresh, 2024.

Summary: Two clinicians, one a neuroscientist and the other a mental heath practitioner, explore how the findings in their two fields may combine to raise mentally healthy, loving, responsible, and resilient children.

Parenting is both a joyful and daunting task. No manuals come with our children. And the urgency seems to never have been greater, with needs for mental health counseling due to anxiety, depression, and behavioral issues rising, as are teen and young adult suicide rates.

This book combines two approaches that together seem to hold a great deal of promise. One approach is the advances in brain science, particularly as imaging helps us look at what is happening in the brain and how things like food, environmental factors, media, and repeated blows to the head affect cognitive processes and brain health. There are things that both harm and help, including parental actions at various points of brain development, particularly since the pre-frontal cortex starts developing before birth and doesn’t finish until about age 25.

The other approach, developed by the Love and Logic Institute teaches parenting with both love and logic. In an early chapter on parenting styles the authors outline how they act in a “love and logic home”:

• I will treat you with respect so that you know how to treat me.
• Feel free to do anything you want, as long as it does not cause a problem for anyone else.
• If you cause a problem, I will ask you to solve it. Please let me know if you need any ideas for doing so.
• If you can’t solve the problem or choose not to, I will do something.
• What I will do will depend on the unique person and the unique situation.
• If you ever believe that something I have done is unfair, please let me know by whispering to me, “I’m not sure that’s fair.”
• We can schedule a time to talk. What you say may or may not change what I decide to do.

Instead of parents who are helicopter parents, drill sergeants, or uninvolved, they discuss a model of of parents as consultants. These parents cultivate deeply affectionate relationships with each child that communicate empowering messages about what their kids can do and let them do it, allowing affordable mistakes, that if possible, the children solve without parents rescuing or micromanaging.

The first part of the book includes chapters on goal setting, ways to build mental fortitude, loving discipline including the development of self-discipline (one power tip here was that when children misbehave, let them know it is draining your energy and that they will need to do something that will replenish that lost energy–as doing a parent’s chores or forgoing an activity requiring parental time). They help us recognize Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) and how they undermine our mental hygiene and how to counter them. There are a couple long chapters on raising strong and capable kids and helping them develop and maintain healthy bodies. They also include chapters on differing parental styles, helping an underachieving child, dealing with technology, and when things just aren’t working and where to get help.

The second part of the book explores specific parenting challenges from potty training to dating, including helpful sections on bullying and peer pressure. They address healthy parenting during divorce and navigating the role of a step parent. They conclude with two lists: 130 things you can do to help your kids grow up to be mentally strong and twenty things parents of mentally strong kids never do.

One of the things I liked about the book is that I felt treated with the respect and affirmation they suggest we cultivate in our homes. One had the sense that we will all make mistakes at this and that even so, there is hope. We can change and our children can grow more resilient, capable of making their own decisions and solving their own problems. I loved this idea of allowing kids to make affordable mistakes early, being allowed to resolve them as well as understanding the consequences their mistakes have for others, including the parent.

This is one of those books, if purchased during parenting years, that is likely to become worn and dog-eared from being referred to so often. There is so much good, practical information that no one could absorb in just one reading. And as one on the other end of parenting, I recognize both some of the things we got right and some of the things we can agree with our adult son that we just got wrong. It’s never too late for that kind of self- and mutual-understanding–another way we may continue to grow in resilience rather than grow inflexibly older.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.