What parents don't know

I received an email from an internet group recently that included this excerpt:

>"Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most, and Raise Happier Kids." The book is based on an elaborate survey into parenting that you may have already heard about in which two-thirds of parents expressed feelings of guilt about their parenting skills.<

I brooded over this matter of inadequate parenting skills for years before deciding to research the subject. I had raised two kids, single-handedly (though with occasional "help" from their mother), through their teen years. In short, the kids reached the age of being on their own, mom died and I was eliminated from their lives because I didn't have as much money as their mother to help them to buy cars, houses and so on. What had I done wrong?

As a teacher and sociologist, I also wondered why so many kids got into trouble in their teen years and why newspapers were filling with more and more crime and addiction stories with each passing year.

By 1999, I had developed a theory, based on sociological principles, my research and input from many friends around the world. It turns out parents all over the world have similar problems. A teacher friend urged me to write a book because she had not heard anything like my ideas before. I told her that I had simply learned what was publicly available from university research papers. She said, no, the core of what I had developed was new and that I must tell others.

Six years later, the book is about to be released and I have learned even more about how little new parents know about parenting and how children learn. New parents learn how to give birth, in Lamaze classes, but we don't have facilities to teach what young children need, how they express their needs and what they do if their needs are not met.

Worse, I reached the shocking conclusion that schools are expected to produce citizens of tomorrow, but are forbidden from doing what they must to develop children toward this objective.

You can read a bit about the book (and some of the book itself) at www.billallin.com/cgi.index.pl
Its followers represent every inhabited continent today. Don't be surprised that you have not heard of the book, called 'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems.' Neither the book nor I are household words. Yet.

By the way, a social problem is any community problem that does not center around infrastructure. So drugs, crime, homelessness, divorce rates, psychological problems and so on, even illiteracy and racism, are included in the solutions.

Can these problems be reduced, while building kids who live in safe communities and who develop balanced lives where they can cope with the downturns in their lives? Yes. Without hiring more police and prison guards, building more prisons and courts and without engaging more psychiatrists and therapists.

As a friend (who has decided to sell the book in his food store because he believes it is so important) said: You have to read the book to understand.

We need your support and your input of ideas when the time comes, not your money. "TIA" is a huge project that will change the world, one community at a time. Today we are a small but dedicated group, with no common affiliation to a political philosophy or religion. Please learn more about us and Turning It Around at www.billallin.com/cgi.index.pl

If you like what you read, join the internet community for TIA at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/turningitaround/

Thanks for reading this far. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems www.billallin.com/cgi.index.pl