My mom always talked about having read a book about dealing with strong willed children when I was a toddler, and it looks like the book Dawn (also my name 😂) mentioned is the one?! Published in 1978, The Strong-Willed Child by James Dobson, as I understand it, is essentially a manual for how to physically abuse and emotionally manipulate your child into compliance.

I don’t have a relationship with my mother, and it blows my mind to see that it was a real book that guided my mother’s parenting of me that led to our estrangement.

(James Dobson is conservative and anti-LGBTQ+ as well.)

It also gives me a measure of hope that Dawn had used this book with her older children and seems to have abandoned it for Mykah.

It’s quite a soulful and dramatic book but at the same time it feels so empty (?). Klara doesn’t really come up with any big revelations and without that what even is this book?