Product Description

Psychotherapist, mother, and author Christine Conners never doubts that the decision of a professional woman to stay home with her young children is the right one. In From High Heels to Bunny Slippers, she supports their decision to personally care for their children with compelling new research on childcare and its potential negative effects on young children, as well as her own firsthand experience as a co-founder of the NASA child development centers. Unlike previous books aimed at this growing readership, Conners recognizes and addresses mothers’ adjustment problems that, like any major life event, arise from the decision to quit your job and stay home. She offers tools and strategies that gently lead the professional woman from the challenge of her work world into the new challenges of parenting full-time. She sympathizes, as a stay-at-home mother herself, with the immediate frustrations of loss of personal identity, financial difficulties, depression, and marital discord. As a mental health professional, she offers her proven techniques for forming a strong new identity as a parent when you leave your career, for addressing financial woes through part-time work and money-saving strategies, for overcoming social isolation, depression, anger, and stress, and for finding personal fulfillment during this special time with your young children.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #731583 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 204 pages

About the Author
Christine Conners is a psychotherapist and counselor with a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Counseling. She was president of the board of directors and a co-founder of the NASA Dryden Child Development Center and worked as a liaison with NASA Headquarters and other NASA centers to define uniform guidelines for NASA child development centers. For the last nine years Christine has been primarily the stay-at-home parent of her four children, though she works part-time as a child therapist for Georgia’s state mental hospital in Savannah. Christine is the co-author of Lipsmackin’ Backpackin’ and Lipsmackin’ Vegetarian Backpackin’. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Customer Reviews

Ridiculous biased views
If you're OK with feeling guilty about anyone besides you or your spouse caring for your children before they go off to college then this book is for you.
I recently left work to stay at home with my 1 year old baby. I had hoped this book would help me with perspective on leaving my career and finding fulfillment and balance in staying home. Instead this book was full of ridiculous biased views. The author cites several examples of parents who left their children with caregivers/daycares/babysitters only to find their children were raped, abused, or belittled. This book details very specific and disturbing examples which are extrapolated to all caregivers. Other extreme views in this book: pets are bad; buy second-hand clothes to save money; don't think about going back to work until your kids are well into teen years or you are selfish and destroying their future; get your man to help with chores by using sex -- Quote p. 109: "So how do we get our man to help? Sex, of course." Not helpful at all. FYI - the author, Christine Conners, has also written a book called "Lipsmackin' Vegetarian Backpackin'." Uh, OK. Wish I knew this before I bought the book.

Not nearly enough on the transition to staying at home!
This book purports to be about the transition from career woman to stay-at-home mother, but what it's really about is justifying the author's lifestyle choices.

Although I don't use strangers as babysitters or daycare, I found her discussion of daycare to be very biased. She mainly uses scare tactics, such as tales of children being abandoned or nearly molested by the babysitter, and controversial comparisons of violence and intelligence between children in daycare and those who stay with their mothers. She also is opposed to having other relatives care for one's child, which I found strange.

While she claims that women should embrace their nature of taking care of children, breastfeeding is depicted negatively in at least one example (where she is at the doctor and her milk comes down, leaving her wet with what's described as sour milk), and she suggests that breastfeeding women keep formula on hand. Her stories of her own post-partum weight retention and untidiness could have been expressed more clearly and in a way that suggested some solutions.

I also found her rants about "discipline" to be totally out of place. She insists that she is a psychologist who knows her stuff and therefore is qualified to inform you that if you don't use her behaviorism-based "discipline" plan, you will be in a world of trouble. She shares a story about ignoring her screaming 18-month old strapped in a shopping cart, until he "learned" that that would not get him any attention. (Let's all hope we don't shop at the same stores as the author.) The bottom line is, it's sad that a book on mothers misses the point and becomes a book about her approach to parenting. And her view is made very clear -- put up the reward chart, trot out the punishments, embrace behaviorism in its entirety, or woe to you! The instructions to readers to "reward" our husbands with sex, and that every woman needs to hire a maid, are also out of place, particularly because of the way she suggests them.

I found this book to be disturbingly off-topic and disappointing.

Ok.
Honestly, this book was sort of good but kind of depressing. I needed to relate to someone else who had left a professional job and found her choice gratifying. This helped somewhat but not much. The trouble is, I didn't find any better books out there on the same topic.