Barry Long says we can't just trust to love and hope our children will turn out well. Love alone is not enough. Parents must also bring spiritual truth and justice to family life.

This radical approach will help parents who want a more real communication with their children, or who struggle to meet their demands. To have harmony in the home requires a rare honesty and fairness. Barry Long's instructive dialogues with mothers and fathers from around the world show readers how it's done.

Based on hundreds of conversations with parents, this is a compendium of practical advice covering very many typical situations that arise from infancy to adolescence.

Includes among many other things:

- How to improve communication and why it's so important.
- How to deal with excitable or demanding behaviour.
- Why children need contact with the natural world.
- The function of toys, fairy stories, pets, games, sport.
- How to address issues of bullying or violence.
- How to deal with Christmas.
- Going to school and what kind of education to select.
- How to handle divorce or separation, and relate to step-children.
- How to help children cope with conflict and death.
- How to diminish the rebelliousness of adolescence.
- The real function of the imagination in the child's development.
- How to address the child's emerging sexuality
- How the child's personality develops and why all children get unhappy.

But this is not just a book for parents. The impressions of childhood run deep in all of us and every reader will gain a unique insight into the ways of the human family.

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From the introductory note to the book:

Most parents find it difficult to cope with all the demands made on them.
Many can't communicate with their children. More and more families suffer from the negative influences of the world or struggle to survive separation and divorce. In most households the irritations and tensions of family life
are accepted as perfectly normal.

For parents who are spiritually aware any lack of harmony in the home is disturbing. It is even more distressing to witness the God-given gift of a
baby child growing up in a world of conflict and confusion. When parents
meet Barry Long, a spiritual master with a very practical approach to life,
they are able to ask his advice and receive his guidance. This book is his response to their need and questions.

Barry Long offers a wide-ranging view of the human condition and shows
how parents today can give their children the best possible preparation for adult life. This spiritual perspective on the family will be revealing to every reader. The book is based on dialogues with mothers and fathers from different countries and deals with many incidents in the life of the child, from toddler to teenager. The central theme throughout is the importance of a right basis for the parent-child relationship.

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