Raising a Child With Heart: Cho Mi-hyeon on Listening at Home

Korean books about parenting often start with how much families care about education. Cho Mi-hyeon opens from that familiar starting point, then looks at practices she associates with Jewish families.

What kept my attention was the book’s shift in scale. It is at its most interesting when the question is small enough to answer at home: what do I do when a child wants me to listen?

Sixty-Nine Ways to Raise a Child With Heart

Cho gathers advice on raising children around examples she presents as part of Jewish family life. The chapters ask what parents can teach in the way they speak and act day to day.

The ten chapter themes give a sense of the book.

1. See the situation as it is.
2. Make room for the fact that parents make mistakes.
3. Put less weight on how others might judge you.
4. Notice where a word of encouragement might help.
5. Think about how care and firmness can go together.
6. Practice what you ask of a child.
7. Teach children to help others.
8. Give children room to build good habits.
9. Let children learn through disagreements.
10. Put the child’s needs before a parent’s pride.

The Figure of the Yiddish Mama

The book uses the image of the Yiddish mama to talk about the role of a mother in a child’s early life. For a Korean reader used to hearing education discussed in terms of school and private academies, it moves the conversation back into the house.

Cho keeps returning to relationships and character. She finds examples of both in the way a family deals with an ordinary day.

I recognized something familiar in that emphasis. A child in Korea can also learn consideration or how to disagree by watching the people they live with. Those lessons are easy to overlook when school is what comes up most often in conversations about education.

Education Begins With Conversation

Conversation runs through the book. The adult is asked to see the child as a person with a view of what is happening.

Talking more leaves time to notice what interests a child and why. Sometimes their answer tells you what they understood about a situation. Sometimes it tells you that the question you asked was the wrong one.

Cho also writes about study as something people can do in conversation with others. That picture appealed to me because it leaves room to ask a new question after the expected answer has been given.

Making an Effort to Understand

I took from the book the idea that a child deserves to be heard before an adult decides how to respond. On a difficult day, that can mean pausing long enough to think before saying the first thing that comes to mind.

Children pick up what the people around them do. If I want a child to listen or show consideration, it is worth asking what they have seen me do in the same situation.

I came away thinking about what a family teaches in small exchanges. That was the part of the book I could imagine putting into practice.

Book Information

Sixty-Nine Ways to Raise a Child With Heart

Author

Cho Mi-hyeon

Publication date

February 22, 2013

ISBN-13

9788956392004

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