Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves (2005)

By Naomi Aldort - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

Praise lowers a child’s self-esteem as surely as criticism does. Naomi Aldort makes this point directly in Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves (2005), and the mechanism is not subtle. “You are so helpful, Johnny!” and “I’m so proud you won first place!” teach a child that the parent’s approval is contingent on performance, that love must be earned, and that the reliable route to being loved is delivering the behavior that produced the last round of applause. Children praised in this way begin doing things for the kudos rather than for their own sake, become dependent on external approval, and fear the day the praise stops arriving. Praise and criticism are structurally identical — both are verdicts a parent pronounces on a child, and both keep the parent’s evaluation at the center of the child’s inner life. The child who is not praised does not become insecure. She becomes a person whose sense of worth does not depend on anyone else’s opinion.

Aldort holds a doctorate and has spent four decades in a counseling practice working by phone and in workshops with parents on multiple continents. Her articles ran through the 1990s and 2000s in Mothering magazine, Life Learning, and The Mother (UK), and she has been a fixture in Attachment Parenting International and La Leche League circles. The 2005 book carries endorsements from John Taylor Gatto, Brad Blanton, Wendy Priesnitz, Patrick Farenga, and Veronika Robinson — figures from the unschooling, radical honesty, and natural-parenting traditions rather than from mainstream child psychology. Her acknowledgments name Robert Mendelsohn among the writers who shaped her thinking, and by her 2026 Listen to Your Baby she was recommending Mendelsohn, Humphries and Bystrianyk, Miller, and Thomas by name, counseling parents through what conventional medicine calls whooping cough and chickenpox without a doctor, and refusing formula in any form. What arrives fully explicit in 2026 is already the operating framework of the earlier book. She is not writing from an academic post. She is writing from decades of direct clinical work with families who had run out of options, and from raising her own three sons on the same principles.

Trust the Body, Trust the Child: On Naomi Aldort’s Listen to Your Baby

The book arrived in 2005, at the moment when “positive discipline” and “gentle parenting” were consolidating as commercial categories and beginning their long march through parenting media. Aldort’s argument is that the new vocabulary had renamed the old control without changing it. Natural consequences, non-punitive time-outs, “engaging cooperation,” and the reward economies that replaced spanking all still asked the child to surrender her will in order to earn parental approval — coercion softened at the surface and preserved underneath. Behind that stood decades of behaviorism that had told parents their job was to shape a child by reinforcing desired outputs and extinguishing undesired ones, a framework the book identifies as the root of the ongoing damage rather than its cure. What was at stake was the difference between a paradigm that treats a child as raw material to be worked and one that treats her as an organism that comes designed to grow.

The book stands in a tradition that runs through A.S. Neill’s Summerhill, John Holt’s writing on children and learning, Alfie Kohn on rewards and punishments, Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, and Byron Katie’s method of thought inquiry — a lineage that has argued for a hundred years that children do not need to be shaped, only nurtured and left room. On the parenting shelf it stands alongside Mendelsohn on pediatrics and the Weston Price lineage on food as the psychological half of a single trust-the-body framework, one Aldort herself would make fully explicit twenty years later. The full summary unpacks the five-step S.A.L.V.E. method Aldort teaches for interrupting a parent’s automatic reactions before they leave the mouth; the distinction between a tantrum that is a strategy for getting something and a tantrum that is emotional discharge over what cannot be changed, and why compensating for the second kind teaches the first; the reason the well-behaved compliant child is often the child in the greatest trouble; and the finding that when siblings fight, the offender is usually in greater emotional need than the apparent victim. Aldort tells parents that emotions are like sweat and a bowel movement — they need to move through, or they find another way out.

Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves is available here.

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