My Child, My Responsibility is the first book to combine a candid and inspirational life story of a young mother overcoming obstacles with a concrete and practical treatment of the difficulties of parenting today.Beginning with an account of a family trip to their roots in Arkansas and a car trip in which a family of six squeezed in her grandparents’ old Buick and got along, Jonetta asks why that is. She looks mainly to the example of her Granny, a strict but loving woman of faith, but also to her Granddad and other hard-working men in the family, and sees that their parenting style differs from that of parents today: today parents often lack discipline–discipline to correct and to love–and therefore children do too. Often parents are unable to work together, and Jonetta’s grandparents offer a great example of what most marriages may aspire to be: a difficult success, but a success nonetheless.Jonetta then turns the camera on herself, offering, as she grows from youth to maturity, a moving perspective on a family full of both faith and failure that will nevertheless see her through her own trials as she becomes a teenage mother and later a divorced mother of three.In the end Jonetta finds that though the generations differ, her experience has shown her there are a number of practical solutions to today’s parenting problems. They begin with honest and loving looks at ourselves, and careful attention to our children and the dangers they face: sexual abuse, drugs, criminal behavior.My Child’s chief virtue is that it combines several different modes dealt with only singly or in very short form in other works. It is a candid and inspirational work of autobiography, like many entries in the Souls of My Sisters and Chicken Soup anthologies, but is not an anthology: readers are given a chance to connect with Jonetta, her story, her voice, in a longer piece that is still very compact. She is also able to deal competently with many parenting and relationship issues, offering practical advice for everyday people, without sounding either too academic or too preachy. My Child offers a success story that we can all relate to: not of success in advertising, television, or law, but where it really matters, in the little things.
