how to manage your mother UNDERSTANDING THE MOST DIFFICULT, COMPLICATED, AND FASCINATING RELATIONSHIP IN YOUR LIFE Alyce Faye Cleese & Brian Bates

1. Remember your mother's age.
2. Listen to your mother.
3. Remember that your mother has a past.
4. Ask your mother simply and directly how you can make her life better.
5. Ask your mother about your childhood history.
6. Get to know your mother's extended family.
7. Decide what personality traits you share with your mother.
8. If you find your mother difficult, confront the issues that divide you.
9. Keep a sense of humor about your mother.
10. Remember that managing your mother is really about managing yourself.

Our mother will always live inside us, whether she is causing a fuss or quietly helping our progress through life.

We need someone to love,
We need someone to hate,
We need someone to survive,
We need someone to blame.

Our mother can fit each of these needs. The book might help us improve our relationship with our mothers - and choose love.

As with all other books on relationships, it’s about changing ourselves. However i highly recommend this book for its writing style, sensibility and usefulness. 4-and-a-half stars.

Nurture the Nature, Michael Gurian

The author, a family therapist, says that we should nurture our children according to their nature instead of following the ‘social trends parenting system’. This social trend takes away parents’ understanding of their children’s nature and follow instead the trends that’s going on in society (Eg. To breastfeed/ not to breastfeed. To co-sleep/ not to co-sleep/ To start pre-school early/ not at all). It basically neglects our natural instincts as parents, believing that everyone else – experts writing in books and magazines, family, friends, neighbors –knows more than the parent does. It gives rise to chronic stress in the American Family.

Boys and girls are hard-wired differently. We need to be aware of that. This is different from stereotyping. Girls tend to develop their fine motor skills (manipulation of small objects) more quickly and fully than boys while boys’ brains develop more connectors for gross motor skills (physical movements of the body).

Three stars
Verdict: To revisit at the kids’ appropriate ages: Four to six, and to read through the relevant chapters till they’re nineteen and older.

a penny for his words...

I'm not a saint or the perfect son. On countless occasions I've ducked their telephone calls. Why would I want to hear my mom talk about the gall bladder problems of somebody I've never met? How would my life be made better by listening to my dad's six hundredth lecture on all the societal problems caused by people wearing their baseball hats backward? My annoyance stems from a universal truth. As people age, their physical size shrinks while everything else expands in a scary way. Talkers talk more. Complainers complain more. Small idiosyncrasies blossom into bizarre screwball behavior.

Mike Leonard in The Ride of Our Lives, where NBC journalist took a cross-country odyssey with his feisty parents for a month.