Beyond Deserving: Children, Parents, and Responsibility Revisited

Drawing on thirty years of practicing psychotherapy, Dorothy Martyn here gives readers a unique look into a play-therapy room where three children individually present their own journeys over some months. These children, in that setting, provide us with a special lens through which we can better understand what transpires in their minds -- and in ours.

Through the children's creative, poetic utterances -- enhanced by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and other literary giants -- Beyond Deserving persuasively argues against the justice idea of reward according to what is deserved and for the superior potency of a beyond-deserving model in cultivating love and creative work in children. Written primarily for parents and other mentors -- teachers, youth leaders, counselors, and so on -- Beyond Deserving draws the subject of child rearing back to its roots in the biblical declaration of unconditional love, love that moves first, without a prior "deserving."