Whole Parenting Guide: Strategies, Resources, & Inspiring Stories for Holistic Parenting and Family Living
by Phil Catalfo, Alan Reder, and Stephanie Renfrow Hamilton
Broadway Books, 1999.
ISBN 0-767-901-339, 448 pages.

The aim of this book is to help parents be better parents. The authors approach the challenge of parenting wholistically. For example, there are discussions on alternate schools, home schooling, volunteering, and responsible consumption. There are guides to fostering family values, nutrition, play, creativity, spirituality, and much more.

The child's mind, body, spiritual growth, and well-being are promoted and integrated as part of the task of childrearing. Improving children's communities, and the planet as a whole is an umbrella held over the family. The authors emphasize that improving children's communities and the planet as a whole is vital to the welfare of families. The book is inspiring. Here is an excerpt:

Not that any parents, the authors included, want to be told what they should be doing, no matter how virtuous. But we do assume that your interest in the parenting approaches described in this book means that you are unusually interested in what's best for your children -- that, in your life, kids come first.

In wanting the "highest possible good" for our kids, most of us would include the following: We want their minds to develop into rich expressions of intelligence, curiosity, and creativity. We want their bodies to be models of health and vigor. We also want our children to become good people, able to negotiate their way through the moral quagmires and cheap entertainments of modern culture without becoming cynical or violent. We want what is uniquely best for each of our children, as well, rather than having them just settle for what society hands them in the way of food, education, recreation, and so on. We want our children to be individuals, too; we know we can't insulate them from mass culture, but we don't want them to disappear into it either. Finally, we want our children to realize that some of the most meaningful aspects of life -- love, a sense of their place in a larger scheme -- are not things they can simply purchase or possess or even put their hands on.

At the end of the day, we want to come away with a clear conscience that we did our best for our kids and the world they are inheriting. Herein, we offer you our best information on how to do just that.

UU families embody many difficult outlooks and forms. There are just as many styles of family as there are ways to be a family. The Whole Parenting Guide invites our various paths and finds the journey of family fulfillment a rewarding one.

We are all up against issues of commercialism, prejudice, drugs, faulty public education, unhealthy food, and poor sexuality education in schools. This book helps parents deal with all of this with guidance. I recommend it highly.