If anyone asks me to recommend a parenting book, this will be my answer. It’s far and away the best one I’ve ever read!

Eli Harwood, a therapist and psychologist specializing in parent-child attachment research, writes with both experienced depth and accessible warmth about how—and why—to build secure connection with your child. For example, in chapter 1, she writes:

“The fascinating paradox that attachment research has revealed about human development is that when we feel securely attached to our caregivers in early childhood, it actually increases our independent adventuring later on. The more secure nurture and co-regulation a child receives, the more internalized confidence and trust they have in us and in themselves, which allows them to focus on the tasks of learning and exploring!”

The book is highly readable, and Eli’s quirky, enthusiastic personality shines through, just as it does in her social media videos (@attachmentnerd).

I particularly appreciate her gentle, non-blaming tone. She emphasizes throughout the book that it’s never too late to work on your relationship with your child.

She then shows, in generous detail, how to proceed with building a more secure parent-child relationship at every stage of a child’s development.

For example, I love the conversation scripts she weaves throughout the book for talking to children in validating, supportive, and connection-building language, like this:

“‘I hear how upset you are about this. This feels terrible to you. I am here. I got you. We will get through this together.’”

I also love how she spells out what is the parent’s job and not the child’s:

“It is not our children’s job to keep us calm; it is our job to recognize when we are getting activated and model taking the steps to get into a more regulated brain and body state.”

This is something I am fervently trying to work on! (See my latest “Parenting Puddles” post.)

Everything Eli says adds to my toolbox for unlearning the parenting mindsets that I (and I think most of my generation) received and learning a new and better way of relating to my kids.

In short, I strongly recommend this book to any parents, at any stage of life—even those whose children are already grown.

Eli has several other books out as well, plus one coming out soon that I’m excited to read: How to Deal with Your (___) So Your Kids Don’t Have To.

Check her out, and if you’re on social media, definitely follow her for insightful, powerful content. I’ve never met her, but I feel like she is a friend, because of her relatability and transparency. And I deeply respect her for her work. 💜

I’m changing my section “Learning Lagoon” to “Book Beach”!

I think the more specific focus will better suit my needs in this busy phase of life I’m in. Maybe later on I’ll have more time for that wider road (of writing about anything I’m learning/interested in); right now I need this narrower shortcut.

I’ve always reading books—I can easily talk about books! 😁

So here is my little “book beach” for talking about books whenever I can. (Given the January cold right now, I’m attracted to anything involving the word “beach”!)

For my first entry, a lovely, gentle, and timely read:

Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan

I just finished the book Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan, a middle-grade novel of interweaving historical fiction stories, plus a bit of magical realism. It’s a rich and beautiful work of storytelling.

I listened to the audiobook through my Libby app (via my library), which was great, especially because of the musical features that are tightly interwoven with the plot of the story.

(Note: if you don’t have Libby [and if you don’t have a library card], you’re missing out on tons of free audiobooks and also ebooks! I would be glad to help you get started if you need it!)

The book consecutively tells the stories of:

1. Friedrich, a misfit boy in Nazi Germany;

2. Mike, an orphan in Philadelphia in 1935; and

3. Ivy, an itinerant farmer’s daughter in California, 1942;

framed by the magical story of Otto, a boy from an older time.

As the characters face hardship and cruelty due to World War II and its many ripple effects, we love them and find goodness, gentleness, and most of all music in the world with them.

For me, this book felt both gentle and relevant, like soothing medicine in times of scary cruelty happening in the world around me. I highly recommend it!

Here’s a very brief bit about why I like each of them, plus a great poem from each—because I feel like talking about them, and I have a few tiny minutes for doing so today!

Note: I have always preferred poets who work with the structures of rhyme and meter (though I certainly appreciate excellent free-verse poems), and these three use rhyme and meter exceedingly well, in my opinion.

Emily Dickinson

I love Emily Dickinson’s unique perspectives and way of putting things. Sometimes she can be a bit hard to understand, but other times she just blows me away.

I have many favorite poems of hers, but this one well suits my purposes (and time scarcity) at the moment:

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies—

The Heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
For fear to be a King—

Her message in this poem deeply resonates with me. I find that I so easily slip into matching the energy, interests, and accomplishments of the people around me, rather than rising up higher, being stronger, and thinking bigger. I want to learn not to wait for life circumstances to force (“call”) me to rise up higher, like a hero; I want that to be “a daily thing”!

Robert Frost

Frost (like Dickinson) writes about both nature and human life with depth of insight. Again, I have very many favorites of his, but here’s a short one I really like. It’s an irony-toned poem about people who don’t want to come out and say what they really mean, but want others to guess or infer it.

Revelation

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

‘Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

I amuse myself with wondering who in Frost’s life (perhaps his wife?) spoke to him in riddles and then got frustrated with him for not having guessed what was meant.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

I very much enjoy E.A.R.’s narrative style; he has some great story-poems about people and characters. But here’s a more broadly reflective one that always resonates with me, especially the part towards the end that I bolded.

The Clerks

I did not think that I should find them there
When I came back again; but there they stood,
As in the days they dreamed of when young blood
Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.
Be sure, they met me with an ancient air, —
And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood
About them; but the men were just as good,
And just as human as they ever were.

And you that ache so much to be sublime,
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
What comes of all your visions and your fears?
Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

I love this expression of grappling with the conflict between ego/vanity and the universal flattener that is Time.

Thanks for sharing this moment of poetry-pleasure with me!

When I read Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy last fall, I was struck by the interesting contrast in point of view that Atwood uses in book two, Year of the Flood (which was my favorite of the three books).

Guess the point of view

The book alternates between the stories of Toby and Ren, two women in separate storylines. But one of their stories is told in third person (like “she thought it was interesting”), and the other’s story is told in first person (like “I thought it was interesting”). See if you can guess which is which, based on my description of the characters and how their stories come across:

1. Toby is tough, self-sufficient, and feels like an outsider as she makes her way through her challenges. We (the readers) like and trust her. We see the things she’s thinking, worrying about, and working to prevent; we understand and respect her choices.

2. Ren, by contrast, has a more passive and slightly clingy personality. She comes across as weak and shallow as she mostly waits to be rescued, even in the flashback parts of her story in which she’s not literally waiting to be rescued. I rarely felt a sense of connection with her feelings and struggles.

Which would you guess was written in first person (“I”), and which in third person (“she”)?

Really, take a minute to make a guess.

Answer

Ok. Did you guess that Ren was written in third person (“she”) and Toby was written in first person (“I”)? That would be my guess.

But it would be wrong.

Toby’s sections were all in third person (“she”), and Ren’s were in first person (“I”)!

This blew my mind. I’ve always tended to think of first person as the point of view that can get the reader in closest touch with the character’s mind. Certainly, I’d read plenty of novels that showed how well that can be done in third person, too; but at least when it came to my own fiction writing, first person seemed much better for accessing characters’ minds. But then Margaret Atwood came along and just smashed my assumptions about this to bits.

More about Ren’s sections vs. Toby’s sections

Ren’s narratives were so basic (like “this happened, and then this happened”), detached, and limply optimistic that several times I suspected that she was an unreliable narrator. But the story never developed in any way to substantially support that, so I was left feeling confused and disappointed in her character and storyline.

By contrast, Toby’s narrative felt substantial and standalone-worthy, and it went more like this: “Toby felt alarmed. She went and got her rifle.” We understood her experience and felt it with her.

I still don’t know why Atwood chose to write Ren’s parts that way (I haven’t gone searching for discussions of the book, so maybe there’s some piece I’m missing—if you know, please enlighten me), but I was quite glad for this stark contrast, because it helped me see some things I want to work on in my own writing.

Some writing lessons I take from this

My takeaway was not that first person was bad/ineffective and third person was good/effective, but rather that effective viewpoint writing depends on the kind of content being portrayed. Whether I’m using first or third person, I want to write character viewpoints like Toby’s, not Ren’s, in the following ways:

1. Get more realistically inside my characters’ points of view to show what they are worrying about, feeling, thinking, and planning as they move through their actions.

2. Show more of the concrete details of my characters’ lives as they would realistically pass through their minds (though only to a degree that enhances the story rather than distracts from it, of course). We see Toby work with her plants and supplies in great detail, and I liked every bit of that. It helped me feel connected to her and her world.

3. Show the ways in which my characters feel like outsiders. I think those are the ways in which they’ll become the most relatable as characters, ironically.

4. Show them as actively trying to protect something—like Toby and unlike Ren, who was mostly just waiting for other people to save her.

I’m trying to incorporate these principles into my current work-in-progress, which I’m writing in first person because that’s what I started in (before I read this book).

In Your Viewpoint

• Do you have a preference between first and third person in your reading or your writing?

• What books stand out to you as excellent examples of character viewpoint writing, in first person and in third person?

• Have you read the MaddAddam trilogy? If so, which book did you like best?