Robin Banks's charming, revealing, and unceasingly funny memoir of her parenting years should be required reading for all young couples thinking of having children. It will surely help them better handle, if not avoid altogether, all the parenting pitfalls she so poignantly and humorously describes.(John Rosemond, Parenting Expert, Author, and Nationally-syndicated Newspaper Columnist)
About the Author: Robin Banks was born and currently resides in Gastonia, North Carolina. She has a B.A. in education and an M.A. in Spanish. She is now a retired Spanish teacher, a wife of thirty-eight years, a mother of three adult children, and a grandmother to Sophia, six years old and Lincoln, three. When she is not writing, she spends much of her time visiting her sons in Raleigh, N.C. and her daughter and son-in-law and their children in Arlington, Virginia. She also enjoys participating in Bible studies and traveling with friends. During the time her children were in school, from kindergarten through high school, she was active either in the PTA or the PTO. She participated in every job from being the president of those organizations to chairing fundraisers and heading up or serving on various school and community committees. As she likes to say, she danced every dance and enjoyed every minute. When Banks was in the throes of rearing her family of one husband, three children, two dogs, multiple stray cats, assorted tropical fish, a pink and a blue Easter chick, a token rodent, and seasonal hermit crabs she had little idea what she was doing. Because of a showdown with her then teenage sons, she became a passionate writer who today brings to the forefront of parenting the need to change the generational cycles of the past in which would-be parents did not prepare for parenthood to a new generational cycle where young people thinking of having a family prepare well before the first baby leaves the hospital, that is, before life dramatically changes forever. Ten years after her last child left home for college, she has proven to be the real deal, a neighborhood mom who writes frankly about her family when children lived at home, so the next generation can know from the outset what she did not know when she first became pregnant. Now a baby boomer on the far side of day to day parenting, she has written Get a Grip: Parenting Tips I Wish I'd Known Then That You Can Know Now in which she gains the reader's trust with a weathered wisdom conveyed through her wry humor and friendly approach, evident not only in this book but in its future sequel as well, Get a Grip II.