Child Whispering: How to Be With Our Children and Their School Work

By J Michael Kirchberg

Working with young people, one-on-one, can be enormously gratifying. It is invariably marked by courage, intimacy and change. It is often awkward, sometimes hilarious and always touching. It evokes gratitude all around and compassion inward. Its rewards can be both immediate and lasting. It is inherently auspicious: opportunity hovers over each encounter. The sessions are pregnant with the expectation that something new will emerge, that some clarification will smooth the way, that change for the better is possible. There is patent opportunity for leverage, for growth, even for transformation. One-on-one work is also, but more subtly, fraught with vulnerability: students come to the work aware of some trouble or some apparent inability or some frustration, and accept the opportunity to address it. Their willingness to submit to that sharing is often moving, even inspiring. The adult helper, perhaps even more subtly, comes to the work vulnerable as well. We helpers hope we can somehow ease things; we hope we can aid in a way that furthers the growth of our children; we may even sense the vulnerability of our standing as parent--the dangerous stake we have in our assistance going well. Shared vulnerability, then--something we may overlook much of the time--also makes such work poignant.This book is intended for those parents who are working with their children on their schoolwork, one-on-one. Parents will find it helpful as a means to reflect on the way they go about their work one-on-one with their children and as a means to improve its impact. The book also serves as a reference for any such helpers--teachers, tutors, other family members---for perspective and guidance on conflicts that may emerge in such work, and finally as a practical guide to supportive, respectful work with their children.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1521716129
• ISBN13: 9781521716120
• Release Date: July 2017
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 6.0"