To bring up a child is to relive your own childhood. Through the child’s eyes, you see and understand your own life anew. This is a book about how our past is with us when we become parents, interweaving itself into our relationship with our children in ways we are rarely aware of. The era, society and culture we live in instil us with ideas about how a child is meant to be, and the family we come from will always be the backdrop to the way we, ourselves, parent our children.

As a psychologist, Rogndal hears women and men alike speak of how important it was for them not to repeat their own childhood with their own children. Even so, some things often do repeat themselves without our reflecting upon it, or else we struggle so hard with our past that it expresses itself in ways we do not like and is passed on to our children. She writes as a mother and based on her background as a psychologist. She is relatively new to both roles, but as a psychologist, there is one thing at least she knows for sure: what makes therapists good is not erasing the impressions of the past but constantly reflecting on and adopting a stance on the way our experiences influence us in our encounters with other people.