I recently finished reading Therapeutic Parenting Essentials: Moving From Trauma to Trust.  Authored by Sarah Naish, the book offers lots of great insight about how trauma impacts children’s thought processes and behaviors, as well as how a deeply nurturing parenting style – what she refers to as therapeutic parenting – helps to overcome common challenges associated with raising children who’ve experienced trauma.  Mrs. Naish, a former social worker, has written several books and is an independent therapeutic parent trainer.  She is well known and respected in the UK, where she founded (and is a committee member of) the National Association of Therapeutic Parents.

First, I loved the readability of this book.  Each chapter shares about a different difficulty or behavior commonly experienced in parenting children with developmental trauma.  Mrs. Naish based those subjects largely on her own anecdotal experiences, which really makes the book so relatable.  She addresses lots of different topics through the 50 chapters, like lying, stealing, sleep, school, friendships, memory concerns, hypervigilance, difficulty with connection, nonsense chatter, executive functioning skills, food issues, anxiety … and the list goes on.  What I especially appreciate is the chapters are short and sweet, making it an easy book to pick up when you have a few moments to yourself.

I also enjoyed that the chapters are told from several perspectives – readers get an inside look at the parent’s and child’s perspective relating to each subject, and then a “What’s Happening Here?” section summarizes the two points of view and offers more ideas to think about and some suggestions to try.  This is great because it not only reveals the whys behind the behaviors, it offers some solutions, which seems to parallel the work of Dan Hughes.

I found myself nodding and smiling many times throughout the book because I related so well to particular passages.  Mrs. Naish is absolutely spot on with her descriptions and insights – both in the parent’s experience and the child’s.  I read several of the chapters out loud to my husband after I said to him, “Hey honey, you gotta listen to this!  This is so us!”  All of the chapters help to make adoptive, foster, and kinship care parents feel not so lonely, but instead very understood and supported.  Each one offers advice and strategies that instill hope for the future.

I also appreciated that she wrote over and over again about how important it is to remember that therapeutic parenting requires consistency, predictability, and reliability to create lasting healing in our children.  She makes it clear that there are no quick fixes and that this journey can be difficult, but sticking with our kids is so worth it.  I highly recommend this read.  Therapeutic Parenting Essentials is an excellent companion book to my other must-read recommendations.