Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot – författare

From growing their children, parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. "Growing up", then, is as much a developmental process of parenthood as it is of childhood. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, and we grow older, what used to be a one-way flow of instruction and support, from parent to child, becomes instead an exchange. We begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them. With Growing Each Other Up, Macarthur Prize winning sociologist and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful account of that experience.Building her book on a series of in-depth interviews with parents around the country, she offers a counterpoint to the usual parental development literature that mostly concerns the adjustment of parents to their babies' rhythms and the ways parents weather the storms of their teenage progeny. The focus here is on the lessons emerging adult children, ages 15 to 35, teach their parents. How are our perspectives as parents shaped by our children? What lessons do we take from them and incorporate into our worldviews? Just how much do we learn often despite our own emotionally fraught resistance from what they have seen of life that we, perhaps, never experienced? From these parent portraits emerges the shape of an education composed by young adult children an education built on witness, growing, intimacy, and acceptance. Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time. Parents and children of all ages will recognize themselves in these evocative and moving accounts and look at their own growing up in a revelatory new light.

In these many-layered and masterfully written portraits, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot reaches deep into human experience,from the drama of birth to the solemn vigil before death,to find the essence of respect. In her moving vision, relayed through powerfully told stories, respect is not the passive deference offered a superior but an active force that creates symmetry even in unequal relationships.The reader becomes an eyewitness to the remarkable empowering nature of respect, both given and received,be it between doctor and patient, teacher and student, photographer and subject, and midwife and labouring mother. They will feel it in the reverent attention paid by a minister to the last moments of life, and in the Harvard Law School professor's lively curiosity about his student's extracurricular lives.Through the power of her narrative, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ultimately makes the reader an intimate partner in her observations of respect linking these varied and intense relationships. A book to be savoured and shared, Respect has the power to transform lives.

"The writing is beautiful, the ideas persuasive, and the picture it paints of the process of careful observation is one that every writer should read. . . . A rich and wonderful book."—American Journal of Education A landmark contribution to the field of research methodology, this remarkable book illuminates the origins, purposes, and features of portraiture—placing it within the larger discourse on social science inquiry and mapping it onto the broader terrain of qualitative research.