'Back on track' book helps parents, children at any phase

Sometimes, as parents, don’t you wish there was a manual that could tell us exactly what to do in every situation? For example, we could go to the index and look up something like: “Surly teenager won’t come out of her room for dinner.” You would turn to the page indicated and an answer would magically appear.

Unfortunately, there is no such manual. Most of the information we get about parenting involves on-the-job training and wisdom from other parents who have experienced similar things.

However, there are books out there that can give us some guidance in specific areas when we have questions about parenting that seem to be slamming us into brick walls at every turn.

Local author Dr. Rebecca Jackson, has just released a book called Back on Track. It focuses on helping children reach their developmental milestones and thrive at every age. Her focus is on understanding how children’s brains develop and what we can do to help nurture that development. She shares specific exercises and techniques for helping children overcome obstacles and setbacks. Some of those setbacks – academic, social and emotional – are the direct result of the pandemic.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jackson for my podcast, the WRAL Daily Download, and I was struck by the fact that as mothers we are all still seeking information about how to best parent our children.

“I wrote the book that I wished had existed when I first became a mother,” Jackson said with a laugh.

Jackson is raising two teenagers, and I have two daughters in their twenties. But as we chatted, I realized that no matter what parenting season we are in, we still have questions and often feel inadequate as we muddle through the chaos of molding children into good and productive humans.

We shared some of those questions with one another, and she immediately pointed me to a chapter in her book that covers one of the topics that I asked her about. It may not be a parenting manual per se, but I’ll take all the help
I can get!