In her eleventh book, Lawrence-Lightfoot, Harvard‘s Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education and author of The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other, presents the parent-child relationship as more reciprocal than the usual models suggest. Parenting isn’t just an opportunity for parents to teach children, she says, but to learn from them as well. This two-way dynamic is ongoing and constantly changing, with the richest and most complex phases taking place when the children are between adolescence and young adulthood. Drawing from extensive interviews with a wide range of families, Lawrence-Lightfoot illustrates in detail how parents can incorporate their children’s experience into their own world views and how the experience of parenting transforms them emotionally.
