Child, Please ― How Mama's Old-school Lessons Helped Me Check Myself Before I Wrecked Myself

""We are different--white moms and me. Very different. More or less kindred as women, but as mothers we are disparate souls. Snaps and cusses of Twitter-trending 'Stuff black moms say' don't even scratch the surface." --from Child, Please In this wiseand funny memoir, Ylonda Gault Caviness describes her journey to the realization that all the parenting advice she was obsessively devouring as a new parent (and sharing with the world as a parenting expert on NPR, Today, in The Huffington Post, and elsewhere) didn't mean scratch compared to her mama's old school wisdom as a strong black woman and mother. With child number one, Caviness set her course: to give her children everything she had. Child number two came along and she patiently persisted. But when her third kid arrived, she was finally so exhausted that she decided to listen to what her mother had been saying to her for years: Give them everything they want, and there'll be nothing left of you. In Child, Please, Caviness describes the road back to embracing a more sane--not to mention loving--way of raising children. Her mother had it right all along"--

Ylonda Gault Caviness, former senior producer at www.iVillage.com’s Pregnancy and Parenting section—the largest women’s website with 37 million monthly views—has been a parenting journalist for more than a decade. She has written forRedbook, Health, Parenting, Pregnancy, and other magazines and websites.


From the Hardcover edition.