DESCRIPTION
A progressive Christian parenting book with a social-justice orientation
How do we build a better world? One key way, says Cindy Wang Brandt, is by learning to raise our children with justice, mercy, and kindness.
In Parenting Forward Brandt equips Christian parents to model a way of following Jesus that has an outward focus, putting priority on loving others, avoiding judgment, and helping those in need. She shows how parents must work on dismantling their own racial, cultural, gender, economic, and religious biases in order to avoid passing them on to their children. “By becoming aware of the complex ways we participate in systems of inequality or hierarchy,” she says, “we begin to resist systemic injustice ourselves, empower our children, and change our communities.”
AWARDS and RECOGNITIONS
Independent Audiobook Awards Non-fiction Finalist (2020)
REVIEWS
Carol Howard Merritt
—pastor and author of Healing Spiritual Wounds
“Cindy Wang Brandt shows us how to respect children, nurture creativity, and encourage their flourishing. Wisdom shines through on every page.”
Rachel Held Evans
—from the foreword
“Parenting Forward is a robust and accessible guide to breaking the cycle of authoritarian, fear-based parenting in favor of a paradigm that pursues and celebrates equality, autonomy, and fully embodied health and wholeness.”
L.R. Knost
—editor-in-chief of Holistic Parenting Magazine
“Powerful and well written, Parenting Forward is a much-needed awakening in a world too willing to close its eyes to its most marginalized, voiceless, and vulnerable inhabitants.”
Catholic Library World
“Brandt sets forth a vision of child rearing that is nonviolent (highlighting extensive research on the harms of corporal punishment), that is committed to respecting the integrity and autonomy and creativity of the child, and that encourages children to be aware of and challenge the injustices of our society.”