This paper reviews Growing Up Again by Jean Illsley Clarke and Connie Dawson, a parenting guide focused on helping parents raise children with genuine self-esteem. The review summarizes the book's core arguments: that effective parenting requires consistent boundaries, appropriate nurturing, and a practice the authors call "discounting" — empowering children to face problems rather than dismissing their concerns. The paper also traces the authors' developmental framework, which follows the parent-child relationship from early childhood through adolescence and eventual departure from home. Finally, the review notes the book's relevance for school counselors in supporting students' emotional growth.
The paper effectively uses evaluative summary — it does not merely retell the book's content but assesses the significance and usefulness of each major concept. For example, the discussion of "discounting" goes beyond definition to explain why the practice matters for child empowerment, and the counseling section identifies which portion of the book is most practically valuable.
The paper opens with a thesis-driven overview of the book's central purpose, then devotes individual paragraphs to the key theoretical concepts (boundaries, nurturing, discounting). It follows the book's own developmental arc before concluding with an applied observation about counselors. The Works Cited entry follows MLA format. The structure mirrors a standard short book review at the undergraduate level.
Growing Up Again by Jean Illsley Clarke and Connie Dawson is a book that makes a concerted effort to establish what the fundamental tools are that parents should employ to raise their children in a balanced environment. The central goal of their approach is instilling a genuine form of self-esteem in children and, subsequently, in the adults they become. The underlying difficulty for all parents is that they want to raise their children in a manner that provides them with self-esteem, but they often do not know what to do.
Largely, this is because parents want to take what they believe helped them as children and adolescents, apply it to their own children, and omit whatever they believe was detrimental. Without a doubt, this will leave many parents in situations in which they have no guidepost by which to judge what mode of parenting will be most effective. Additionally, the authors caution that "some people who received neglectful, abusive, or smothering parenting are so determined to not do the same that they 'parent by doing the opposite.' The hazard is that they can often go too far" (Clarke, 7). In short, this sort of pattern demands some form of outside information, and Clarke and Dawson intend to provide it.
According to the authors, at the core of good parenting are appropriate boundaries. Many boundaries are built up simply through structure in a daily routine; however, other forms of structure need to be explicitly set. Above all, the structures that parents provide for their children need to be consistent: consistent punishments, consistent rewards, and consistent acknowledgement of appropriate behavior. At first, the authors contend, young children may not even be aware that they are conforming to the boundaries their parents have set, but eventually they will learn to negotiate the terms of those boundaries.
Accordingly, "As children grow older it is important to increase the number of negotiable rules, making some of the nonnegotiable negotiable" (Clarke, 34). Clarke and Dawson also stress the importance of not making rules immutable. If rules cannot be changed, they effectively become the child's entire structure; instead, the structure itself should maintain its implicit properties through flexible, adaptable rule-making.
Clarke, Jean Illsley, and Connie Dawson. Growing Up Again. New York: Harper and Row, 1998.
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