I became interested in Tsabary after an invitation to one of her conferences. Trying to become familiar with her work I watched her TEDx talk in SF and an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Her thesis about changing the idea of perfect parenting for self-improvement through our interactions with our children is right on. Even more when combined with mindfulness to be aware and sensible to the moments parents get hooked in power struggles with their children. However, I read her book just to be disappointed.
To begin with, Tsabary's hubris is overwhelming. Not many authors sign their book with their degrees - PhD. Is this a sign of what is inside? Being a scientist (assuming the degree from Columbia means a training in the science) the reader would expect some intellectual humility. Isaac Newton said "if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulder of giants". Not for Tsabary. In spite of many of her ideas can be tracked to other people's work the books have no references, no mentions of anyone but her and her patients. The ideas in the book can be track to intellectuals like Freud, Csikszentmihalyi, Kahneman, Branden, Nietzsche, Baumrind, Pinker and the evolutionary psychologists, and more. She does not claim that the ideas are original but the omision speaks for itself.
Tsabary's work is not only unoriginal but contradictory. For instance she blames the parenting errors to the ego, but also advices that if parents do not care for themselves little can be done; Ego-Self long debate which Tsabary ignores and oversimplifies like in.
"The key to conscious parenting is to become aware of our ego, this persistent voice in our head, and its false ways. To parent well, it is imperative that we realize the ego isn’t who we are."
Tsabary's idea is to "re-educate" the ego. The ego is emotional, impulsive. By being aware we use our reason. In other words her advice can be summarized using Kahneman's terminology as making system 2 take control before relying on system 1 to respond in automatic but more coherently with our values.
Finally, irritating and bad science is her generalization of bad parenting. Maybe from her own experience as a mother and clinical psychologist she considers that all parents are dysfunctional, victims of their own parents, ill-fated, unable to have moral judgment and exercise their free will to be better. At times the book makes the reader feel overwhelmed; I'm such a bad parent. Human contradiction show up in all spheres; work, love relationships, leisure, education, etc. yet we keep moving forward improving. Why is parenting different? Tsabary's rhetoric resembles some religions by making people feel bad before taking the salvation ace under her sleeve.
