Despite it's fairly niche-oriented, laser-like book title, Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd's The Parents We Mean To Be isn't just for parents' eyes only. Rather, its subtitle aptly points toward a broader relevant audience for his important insights about "How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development." There is as much here for educators as parents, in other words. We all have a stake--as well as crucial, complementary roles to play--in facilitating our children’s ethical and social-emotional development.

Professor Weissbourd offers here a common-sensical, research-based analysis of the policies, priorities, and practices of parents and teachers most--or least--conducive to nurturing our children's character and moral development. He understands the pressures that "the achievement craze" places on kids, their teachers and parents. And he documents how our culture's fetishizing of happiness often deprives both children and adults of the opportunity to learn from adversity, develop resilience, etc. Weissbourd's study is based on field research in representative schools. It's also well-written, and eminently accessible to even lay readers. It's an important new contribution to a burgeoning field. Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee was one of the seminal contributions to this literature. Weissbourd’s The Parents We Mean To Be is likely to become a similarly well-thumbed staple of the genre.

Dr. Weissbourd is a child and family psychologist on the faculty of Harvard’s School of Education and Kennedy School of Government. He is a widely-published author who writes with clarity as well as humor. The book is leavened with illustrative anecdotes and incisive, witty observations (like this one from the first paragraph of chapter one): “Pickup basketball provides all sorts of opportunities to shine or regress morally. It is sometimes difficult in these games to distinguish, in fact, disturbed behavior from normal forms of male competitive idiocy.”

Weissbourd’s main message is that parents, of course, are our children’s primary moral mentors. Yet even our best intentions to nurture our children’s happiness and ensure their success can go awry. He cautions us to attend as much to our own—lifelong—moral development as we do to our children’s. We are their moral mentors and role models in all sorts of ways. But facilitating their ongoing moral and social-emotional maturation requires us parents to walk the walk we talk—to practice what we preach, as well.

The Parents We Mean To Be includes chapters on morally mature sports parenting, promoting happiness and morality, helping children manage destructive emotions, child-rearing similarities and differences among various ethnic cultures, as well as cultivating moral idealism in our youth. At just over 200 pages, however, the book covers all this ground concisely.