Imagine sitting in the room across from your psychologist. Now switch tables and picture yourself as the psychologist. Love & Rage is a journey from the other side of the table where the author—Nupur Dhingra Paiva—pens her experiences as a child psychologist.
Sitting in a room and attempting to talk about your feelings to a complete stranger can be hard. What Paiva does instead is that she shows us a window into the world of a psychologist where the furniture remains the same but the storytellers come and go. Each child has its own challenge and while they may be dealing with the latest change in their environment, Nupur tries to explore the ways in which a child can be prepared to let out all those things that are pent up.
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What works?
If you are a parent or a teacher or someone who is in close association with children, this is perhaps a guide for you to tackle every mood swing. More importantly, if you wonder why your child has abruptly stopped talking or shows uncharacteristic changes in behaviour then yes, this is the book you need to read. This is the book which, even though it doesn’t solve the mystery of what goes in a child’s head, still manages to create a pathway for better discourse.
More than anything, it will make you think back to your younger version and introspect all your erratic behaviour and drastic mood swings. Looking through the lens of psychodynamic theory, you may as well realize that with each change in your surrounding as you grew up, came a bigger change in the way you look at things, deal in adverse situations and build relationships.
What doesn’t work?
Even though this book is written for children (at least at some level), it will fail to connect to a younger audience as it digresses quite often. For a parent, this may begin to sound preachy and make one even look for things that are not there. Even as the book addresses issues that should be dealt with first hand, it still fails to give solutions.
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From the messy periods of emotional turmoil to the tumultuous moments of self-doubt, this book will remind you of every breakdown and every low-point as you look for ways to pull yourself out of the mess. The author manages to lay down the exact phases that the child goes through and is indeed a lens through which you can look at the inner world of children.
