Raising A Successful Child (The Manual) gets to the heart of what every parent needs to know to have a warm, loving, emotionally healthy relationship with their baby and to raise a happy, healthy, secure child. Based on past successful parenting practices and even more excitingly on fairly recent research findings that point to new directions in parenting, this book provides in clear and simple language the tools for raising successful children. The typical extremes of parenting books alternate between extremes of overparenting and more recently, "tough-parenting." As always, the pendulum swings from one extreme to the other, while the real answers and healthy approaches to parenting reside in the healthy valley between these extremes. Raising A Successful Child (The Manual) introduces parents to the idea of a balanced life for a child--work and play are equally important at all stages of development. The Manual further provides an easy to follow road map to help both child and parent develope a healthy, loving, and, yes, successful life. Exploring all the things that can go wrong, reading about alarmist sentiments or vignettes of struggling parents does little to build confidence in parents. Rather than focusing on psychiatric diagnoses, Raising a successful Child (The Manual) departs from this trend and offers parents a concise, clearly written guide on the art of parenting. The Manual tempers the hubbub of so many prescriptions and "how-to's" and gently guides parents to the most essential ingredient---the relationship between them and their child. As such, The Manual inspires different sorts of questions than are commonly seen in parenting books. Rather than, "How can I make my child stop having tantrums?" or "How can I make my child perform better in school?," new questions arise: "How can I builde a relationship with my child that's emotionally healthy and helps my child move from a state of absolute dependance to successful independance?" Raising A Successful Child (The Manual) makes it clear that the most urgent demand upon parents is to be with their children. Multiple suggestions are offered to help parents develope a working plan. An essential component in this process is significant self-awareness on the part of parents with regard to their own inherited ideas about child- rearing, Equipped with the information in this book, parents can weigh the assumptions they've acquired from their families, social networks, and the media against the facts and develope a parenting plan they can feel secure with. Raising A Successful Child ( The Manual) lays the groundwork for everything that is vital to the parent-child relationchip. It is a book written for parents who are looking for answers amidst the clutter of extremes.