As a new parent, I found the book Under Pressure by Carl Honore to be a welcome slap in the face.  Luckily I haven’t had time to descend into the madness of hyper-parenting but I’ve already begun to hear the seductive siren song.  After all who doesn’t want their kids to be better, smarter, stronger, faster?  We all do, we all want the best for our children.   But we often lose sight of what our children actually want in favor of what we want for them.

Traveling around the world Honore shows time and again that kids don’t want hyper-parenting, and that despite our best efforts it does not help them succeed more or become better people.  It often backfires and has the opposite effect.  What kids want and need is: to feel safe and loved, they want our attention and time with no conditions attached, they need boundaries and limits, they need space to take risks and make mistakes, they need to spend time outdoors, they need to be ranked and measured less, they need healthy food, they need to aspire to something bigger than owning stuff and they need room to be themselves.

Honore argues for us to slow down, and adopt a saner view of childhood.   I could not agree more.  I highly, highly recommend this book for all parents.  We can do better by our children, but not through hyper-parenting.  I think the following quote from the last chapter of the book, sums things up nicely.

“Half a century ago, an influential English pediatrician called D.W. Winnicott argued that engineering the perfect childhood was impossible and that striving to do so was damaging both to the parent and to the child.  Instead, parents should aspire to meet their children’s needs most of the time and accept that they will mess up occasionally.  Do a ‘good enough’ job, said Winnicott, and most children will grow up fine.”

Do your children a favor, get this book, read this book.

What are your thoughts?  Share them with us in the comments section below.

Enter Business as Unusual by Anita Roddick, one of the founders of the Body Shop.

In this book she talks candidly about her experience from founding the Body Shop to making it a worldwide company.  How she never compromised her principles despite intense pressure within and without the company to stop “her silliness and get with the program”, that is, running a business with the bottom line as the only goal.  She talks about being a leader in cruelty-free cosmetics (no animal testing), recycling, encouraging others both within and outside the company to be politically active about causes they care about, and going straight to poor and underserved populations to improve their quality of life.

If you’ve resigned yourself to business as usual as exemplified by the Great Recession we’re going through, caused primarily by the myopic focus on the short-term bottom line and greed, this book is a refreshing breath of fresh air.  You can be successful, found and run a multi-million dollar international company with both principles and profits.  You do NOT have to compromise your principles in order to be successful.

If this topic is of interest to you, I highly recommend picking up Business as Unusual and giving it a read.

Have you read the book?  Have you struggled between principles and profits in your life?  Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Watch the video here.

What are your thoughts?  We’d love to hear them.  Share them with us below.

In case you can’t view the video, or would like the words they are:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

What are your thoughts?  Have you extended compassion lately and what have the results been?  Please share with us below.