Nelsen Middle School Vice Principal Dr. Elaine Love doesn’t want technology to become the surrogate parent of today’s child.
In her new book, “Parenting Yesterday, Parenting Today: Is Technology our New Surrogate Parent? A Psychological Perspective of a Culturally Diverse Society,” she gives parents a toolbox of ideas and concepts to ponder to avoid such a predicament.
“There are excellent materials available to prepare parents from zero to birth, age one, the terrible twos, and maybe a few more years, but what happens when the children enter pre-school,” writes Love in her book.
Love encourages parents to keep reading starting with “Parenting Yesterday, Parenting Today.” In it, she outlines different parenting styles and asks the reader to reflect on how they were raised and was it effective. She offers her own insight with stories about her upbringing in New York City and Florida as a mixed child, with Hispanic and black heritage.
She takes the reader on a reflective journey with her as she asks pointed questions and provides space for the reader to journal throughout the book.
“It just kind of seems like we’re losing time where we sit at the table with our kids; we talk about how our day was,” Love said. “If we’re sitting at the table with our kids they’re usually texting and talking instead of that family time.”
She addresses diverse families and uses an exercise to create a poem as a tool for parents to help their children embrace their cultural background, adapted from George Ella Lyon exercise. Love creates her own “Where I Am From” poem as an example: “I am from a culture that by age nine, I would catch the subway or city bus alone to get to and from school.”
Building self-confidence and identity, she offers advice on how mixed families can celebrate their heritage.
Touching on tragedy that befell her own parents, Love explores what it’s like to be a single parent and gets parents to think about resources they might need to aid them in child rearing.
“What I see now with our kids too, a lot of kids are dealing with tragedy,” Love said. “Sometimes you see kids in foster care, well why are they in foster care? You know, and those are the things we need to look at. Basically, I’m saying we all go from tragedy, but in the end what do we do to recoup from it.”
It’s a concise read, with short chapters and plenty of space for journaling and reflection.
“I’m hoping that this will bring more family time back into family and also give parents other ideas as to what they can do to help their kids throughout their school years,” said Love.
The author will be signing her book Saturday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., at Barnes & Noble Southcenter.
