OFFSITE Book Launch: Breaking Through by Mary Willow

Join Mary Willow at Meow for the launch of her highly asked for and much anticipated book Breaking Through: How to Rescue Childhood and Heal the Parent-Child Relationship, published by Bateman Books.

About Mary and the book:
For 35 years Mary Willow practiced as a registered nurse, certified midwife and early childhood teacher in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Canada. She came into regular contact with struggling parents. In 2007, she responded to this need by founding Plum Parenting, a service providing one-on-one education and mentoring to help parents with parenting as well as group parenting classes. She has had a 10 — 12 month waiting list every year for the last 16 years, all by word of mouth, and is inundated with invitations to talk at schools and conferences here and around the world.
Breaking Through is the result of years of pleading for ‘the book!’ from Mary’s clients, teachers and audiences who have found her approach to be a ‘game changer’.
Mary says, ‘Parents are the ones at the coalface struggling daily with the huge challenge of parenting in today’s environment. Increasingly they report that their children are not responding to them, even when all the latest theories of emotional empathy and empowerment of child agency — or even back to ‘boot camp’ — are applied. They come to me in droves - and in tears.’
For these parents, life has become a misery of meltdowns. They are desperate for a book that can explain in plain and vivid language what is going wrong and how to fix it. This is that book.
Mary identifies the stark difference between the guarded and intolerant defence system — which she calls the ‘Guard Dog’ — and the open and tolerant ‘True Child’. The key message is that if childhood is not handled the right way it is possible to inadvertently over-empower the Guard Dog, so that instead of protecting the child, it becomes a feral over-protector and hardwires the child for anxiety.
When this happens, the child becomes enslaved to their defence system and its imperative for control, developing patterns of intolerance and the high expectation of compliance — often referred to as ‘entitlement’.
Mary gives step by step guidance on how to successfully ‘whisper’ the Guard Dog and settle it into the ‘back seat’ of the child’s psyche where it belongs — on call for real emergencies and no longer treating everyday life as a catastrophe. When the Guard Dog lets go, the True Child is set free and is now accessible to parental guidance, encouragement and the joy of learning!
In Breaking Through Mary shows how to nurture the life of the child to lay the right foundations of security, self-esteem and age-appropriate self-determination, empowering the True Child to become responsive to others, able to tolerate frustration, regulate impulsivity and make an effort to meet the world — even when not easy!