The Book on Parenting
- September 25, 2010
Marilyn Lane has been involved with education one way or another for most of her life.
She started off instructing her neighborhood friends before becoming a teacher and then an educational consultant.
Lane lives in Crescent City (where her husband Clark’s family lives) part of the year and in Arizona (where her family lives) the other part.
After traveling around the world doing workshops on building children’s self-esteem, Lane and her colleague Robert Reasoner decided to put down in print the advice they gave.
The end result is “Parenting with Purpose,” which aims to help parents raise their children with values and vision.
“I felt strongly about the importance of parenting, of being there,” Lane said about writing the book.
“Parenting with Purpose” has won an iParenting Media Award and has been translated into Russian, Korean and Arabic. Lane said it’s been a “good seller.” It’s available at online booksellers and at the Bookcomber.
‘Thinking parent’s book’
After doing a workshop in Slovenia, parents kept asking Lane, “Do you have that written down?”
Back in the U.S., with Lane in San Francisco and Reasoner in Washington, they wrote “Parenting with Purpose” by email.
Parenting books can give a lot of “one-shot answers” on how to stop a child from wetting the bed, for example, Lane said. This is the “thinking parent’s book,” she said.
The book covers “what they want their children to be like as adults” and “what values they want to pass on,” she said.
Parents should plan how to raise their child just like they would plan their finances, she said.
“No one gives you a manual,” Lane said about becoming a parent.
It asks parents to look at themselves and the “experiences that made them who they are,” Lane explained, but also what shaped how they parent.
The way their parents raised them is the natural model for people, she said.
“It take a conscious, daily effort to parent the way you wish you were parented,” Lane said.
It’s a difficult thing to do if people don’t agree with how they were parented or are angry with their parents, she said.
Getting involved
On the cover, the book promises “five keys to raising children with values and vision.”
Those building blocks, as Lane called them, are: security, identity, belonging, purpose and competence.
What parents will learn from the book is how to identify their child’s strengths and weaknesses. Parents can do then do activities to building on those strong points, Lane said.
There are also sections about raising children who are gifted, those with special needs or learning disabilities and foster children.
Some parents are not involved in their children’s upbringing for various reasons.
“We have to reach those parents,” Lane said. “Kids who need love the most have the most problems.”
Getting those parents involved in their children’s lives at school and at home can make the difference in kids who have emotional or behavioral problems.
“I haven’t found a parent who doesn’t truly love their kids,” Lane said.
But it’s hard for parents nowadays because typically both are working full-time, she said.
“It’s a big job,” she said about parenting, adding that “parents are the first teachers.”
Finding education
Lane was born and raised in Michigan, where her upbringing was like a Norman Rockwell painting, she explained.
At 12, she contracted polio and wasn’t able to walk. She read through the illness.
“I read everything in the library,” Lane said.
Her family moved to Long Beach to be in a better climate.
After two years of college, she got married and had four children.
As a parent, Lane completed her undergraduate studies “one class at a time” in English literature and anthropology at California State University, East Bay, and went into teaching. She taught elementary school in Los Altos Hills.
“I always wanted to be a teacher,” she said. As a child, she used to make the neighborhood kids be pupils and she the teacher.
Lane received her master’s and administrative credential from California State University at San Jose.
All the world a classroom
Her first husband’s job took her to Saudi Arabia, where she taught gifted students at an international school.
Lane said she went into gifted education because there’s no advocate for those students. Gifted students who are not challenged run the risk of dropping out of school mentally.
“I feel that a lot of children who are gifted go unrecognized,” Lane said, giving examples of children in the U.S. who don’t speak English or those from poor families. “The gifted can feel isolated.”
As a consultant, she offers activities “to develop a sense of purpose” in gifted children that supplements the school’s curriculum.
About 15 years ago, Lane started dong consulting work. She developed a curriculum on self-responsibility for schools in Russia.
She traveled to Trinidad at the behest of the prime minister’s wife, who wanted to change the school from a British system to an American system.
She did workshops in a Bosnian youth prison, and said she will never forget the art teacher who queried Lane about how to break the cycle of kids coming in and out of the penitentiary.
“It was the most haunting experience I’ve ever had,” she said.
Lane has been an elementary school principal. She taught certification classes in differentiation and gifted education across California and was the president of the California Center for Self-Esteem.
Between Crescent City and Oro Valley, Ariz., Lane is currently working on a book about being a grandparent and a children’s book and is open to doing workshops for the community.
“My greatest accomplishment is my family,” she said. “They’re all good people. That’s the hope of all parents.”
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