— Roy W. Menninger, M.D. Menninger Foundation

"This is a book that parents should have by their bedside...a book that child agency personnel and caregivers should read and recommend to their clients...and that teachers should apply in their classrooms."

"I read those five needs over ten times and then again. These are not needs of boys and girls. They are critical needs of human beings."

— Lily Eskelsen Garcia, Vice President, National Education Association

"Your commitment to enhancing the health and well-being of children by supporting parents in meeting their emotional needs is commendable and deeply appreciated."

— Dr. David Satcher, 16th Surgeon General of the U.S.

"There are many educational books and DVDs out there, but many are too hard for the parents to understand....I found the 'How To Raise Emotionally Healthy Children' book and DVD to be just right for our parents to ensure successful outcomes in every avenue of their lives."

— Almeta Keys, Director, Edward C. Mazique Parent Child Center, Washington, DC and Board Member, National Head Start Association

Reviews and Testimonials 2017-10-04T02:50:07+00:00

Testimonials and Book Reviews

From Organizations

We have used this book in various ways. The most poignant use was with our preschool fathers. Beginning in 2011 we have offered “Just for Dads” training. The fathers receive a copy of the book and are led through a discussion and related activities. Many tears are shed as the fathers relate their own childhood experiences to the critical emotional needs explained by Dr. Newmark’s book. Fathers were asked to keep a daily journal and reflect on how they provide support for their children.
Joan Prehoda, Principal, Early Childhood Education, Palm Springs Unified School District, CA
Congratulations on the outstanding success of the 4-week read-a-thon conducted by the Salinas City Elementary School District based on your book, ‘How To Raise Emotionally Healthy Children’, and involving over 3,000 parents and teachers. Its message that satisfying a child’s five critical emotional needs—the need to feel respected, important, accepted, included and secure—can provide a foundation for success in school, work, family, relationships, marriage, and life in general was well received and appreciated.
Dennis Donohue, Former Mayor, Salinas, CA
This book changes lives! Sistah Connection, the Breastfeeding Peer Counseling Project in Riverside County has been using Dr. Gerald Newmark’s book as part of our 10-part Moms to Moms series created to counter the low breastfeeding initiation and duration rates. This book, along with peer support, has helped many women become confident in their decision to breastfeed and make a choice to parent in a way they had never experienced before. In a way that gives their children a voice.
Sistah Connection, Breastfeeding Peer Counseling Project

From Professionals and Educators

If one takes each of Newmark’s critical emotional needs in order, one can recognize that people who grow up to be criminals had, in their early years, never been respected, made to feel important, accepted (in many cases, their parents rejected them at birth), included in law-abiding society. For all of those reasons, they have had insecure feelings all their lives. Those deficiencies in their lives propelled them into lives of crime, drug addiction, and mental illness.
Lewis Yablonsky, PhD, Sociologist, Author of Juvenile Delinquency Into the 21st Century, Fathers & Sons, The Violent Gang
After working more than 25 years in the Behavioral Health field, I believe this project and the book that started it all, is the single most powerful message for emotional health in our time. I am committed to spreading the word. Simple, easy to read and straight forward advice on improved emotional health for children, parents, employers, and even governments. Do yourself, your loved ones and the world a favor, read this book, join the emotional health movement, and help spread the message of meeting the five critical emotional needs: to feel important, respected, included, accepted and secure.
Bob Brunson, LMFT, Monterey County Behavioral Health Services Department
As a life-long California public school educator, husband, parent, grandparent and presently a part-time adjunct university instructor teaching in undergraduate and graduate programs, I can assure you that ‘How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Children’ demands your attention and purchase. Finally there is a book that actually addresses the single most vital issue confronting American culture. We all talk about the emotional health void in the United States and now there is a witty, smart, humorous and easily readable book that addresses this national ill. This book is such a public service to us all that I think it deserves to be nominated for a Nobel Prize in Health!
Harold Kahn, Ed.D

 

 

Readers’ Reviews from Amazon.com

Emotionally helpful for young and old. I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book. It is different from all the other books that tell you how to parent effectively. It helps you, the parent, recognize your child’s needs because they are just the same as your own. Obviously reading this made me reflect on my own childhood. I could finally relate my family to the pages in the book and I had some deep revelations about myself….Chapters four and five are specific to parents and they are my favorites. Learn how to be a professional parent with specific game plans with individualized goals to reach and actions to take. Reduce the parenting stresses and take control of your own life by making to-do lists, prioritizing or just stepping back from the overwhelming struggles.
Beth Sanborn, Far From Camelot Blog
The Missing Agenda—Unveiled. Gerald Newmark’s treatise on meeting the five critical needs of children (and of all people) is indeed the ‘found agenda’on how to raise emotionally healthy children. Dr. Newmark has taken a highly complex, socially vital, and virtually ignored topic, and translated it into a clear and simply structured, step-by-step program—which can be understood by all people, and applied at home and in the schools. A great work, a parenting bible, and a program that as Dr. Newmark says, ‘might just change the world.’
Maddisen K. Krown
What parents want to know but don’t know who to ask. My husband and I were very young parents with not a clue as how to raise our children. Our lives and our children’s lives would have been so much easier if this book had only been written then. We go to school to learn the 3 R’s, but there is no school for parenting. This book is so insightful, and makes so much sense, it should be read by every person who has or expects to have children.
Rose Marie Thaler, parent, grandparent, great grandparent