To drive a car or buy a gun requires a license and some instruction. To parent requires only having a child. Yet the job of parenting is the most important job anyone will ever do, because parenting plays a huge part in building the future of the world. Many parenting books offer suggestions about controlling our children, directing them, shaping them as we need them to be.
In "Raising the Future," author R. Felice Gedeon-Gaude encourages parents to see the uniqueness of each child, asking them to explore how to foster that uniqueness while facilitating the safe, healthy, and appropriate growth of the children in their care. This guide offers methods for parents to explore their own memories of being parented, in order to recognize the sources of their responses to their children's behavior. "Raising the Future" also directs parents to listen carefully to their children, because it is through those exchanges that parents will better understand how to help them to grow into well-adjusted children and, eventually, happy, productive adults.