| Managing My Life: The Art of Joyful Parenting |
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| Reviewed by Ceri Balston | |
| Wednesday, 10 September 2008 | |
   By George Beshara, Michelle MacIntosh, Margret Zuccaro  Managing My Life: The Art of Joyful Parenting is an e-course designed to help you improve your parenting skills and bring additional fulfilment in your life. It’s packed full of excellent advice and covers just about every concern or topic that parents may encounter.The course is broken down into three chapters and takes about two to three hours to complete, depending on how much contemplation you give to each of the tasks you’re frequently set. The first chapter introduces the key concepts of the course and discusses parenting issues and pressures in general. The second chapter, ‘The Dynamics of Parenting’ leads you through a detailed introspection of your own role as a parent, including what motivates you about parenting and what challenges you; your responsibilities as a parent; your personality style, your parenting style; the needs of children at different stages of their lives; and the extent of your attributes and knowledge areas when it comes to parenting. You do need a special piece of software called a DNL Reader to be able to access the e-course which at first put me off this product slightly. It was very a small file to download though, simple to install and I very quickly started to wonder what I was concerned about. In fact the DNL Reader makes the course feel more like a book and by taking up the whole screen on the computer, including the often cluttered task bar at the bottom, which has the interesting effect of making the course far more absorbing and also reduces the chances of being distracted by any potential WAB-ing (work avoidance behaviour) activities. This was the first e-course of this type that I’ve completed and even though I thought I favoured printed books I found the format of the e-course to make the content a lot more valuable and much easier to fully engage with. What I particularly noticed, perhaps because I was working through the course on my laptop which for me is a far more action orientated activity than reading a book, is that I managed to follow through and complete most of the suggested tasks straight away. I did enjoy doing them as well and, despite struggling to find the time to complete all the tasks set, did find a great deal of value in the introspection that it triggered. Six ‘research families’ who come from a variety of backgrounds and experience were featured through the course. They range from a nuclear family to a single parent family, a family with grown up children and a newly formed family with children from previous relationships. The real examples used to highlight the various points in the book help to make this a very accessible course and we think relevant to every parent. Indeed, although the course is aimed at parents with children who are at least toddlers, and even though my wife and I have ourselves have only been parents for just a couple of months, we still found the information and advice it contained to be extremely interesting and valuable. It has made both of us evaluate what kind of parents we’d like to be and what aspects of our life we need to address. Setting an example is a lesson that has really stuck in my mind and has made us think that we really do need to do something about our exercise routine and get more balance in our lives between work and play. We both completed the course and really enjoyed the dialogue and communication between the two of us that it initiated. Finding the time to stop and think and then chat about parenting choices is so hard and yet so necessary and we think that doing the Art of Joyful Parenting course will really help. It certainly feels like a privilege to be able to prepare for the more involved challenges of parenting now without being under the stress of dealing with things like tantrums. I would also say that The Art of Joyful Parenting e-course has made us realise that we don’t need to go out a collect a library of books as so much is covered, and there’s also frequent links to visit websites that will give further information on a particular topic if you do need to go and explore something further. |
This is the powerful story of the author's struggle with Multiple Sclerosis and how a healer's unusual prescription of mindful altruism - to 'give away 29 gifts in 29 days' - ignited her energy, her happiness, and invited more abundance into her life.
