Stepfather Knows Best : Haim Ginott’s Books Are Being Reissued--and the Only Child He Helped Raise Heartily Endorses Them : <i> Our aid must be subtle and sophisticated.</i> --Haim G. Ginott, “Between Parent & Teenager”

Mimi Ginott Kaough recalled that when she was 14, her stepfather hired her to type his nationally syndicated parenting columns. But as she typed, she edited the manuscripts to please herself.

“My mother was shocked. She’d say, ‘How can you change Haim Ginott’s work?’ He’d look it over and say, ‘You know, this is great. I really like it a lot better.’

“My mother didn’t tell me until recently that he had explained to her, ‘Alice, I’ve got an editor. Whatever they don’t like, they’ll change anyway.’

“At the time, I had no idea he was working on my ego and self-confidence,” said Kaough, now a 38-year-old New York lawyer and mother of two.

What Ginott preached he practiced at home and felt in his heart, Kaough said. She should know. As the stepdaughter of the pioneering child-raising expert, she is the only child he ever helped raise.

Her admiration adds a topcoat of credibility to his work, which is resurfacing this spring, more than two decades after his death. Collier Books has reissued Ginott’s “Teacher & Child” as a trade paperback; his others, “Between Parent & Child” and “Between Parent & Teenager” will follow.

Over the years, Ginott’s book sales have been strong and steady, said Mark Chimsky, former editor in chief of Collier Books at MacMillan. Their basic message--listen, praise, and validate feelings to encourage good behavior and high achievement--set the theme for nearly every popular parenting book since.

Reissuing the books made sense, Chimsky said: “If all the others recalled him, why not bring back the original?” Besides, Chimsky figured that he was a representative baby boomer who remembers as a child adoring Ginott, a frequent guest on “Today.” “He was the grandfather all of us dream of having: the twinkle in his eye, the warm-hearted approach, the soft-spoken humor.”

Building on the work of baby doctor Benjamin Spock, psychologist Ginott appealed to parents of the ‘60s, torn between Victorian authoritarianism and Spock’s permissiveness.

“He was able to straddle the fence between validating children and their feelings and yet helping them to become socialized human beings,” said Gisela Booth, professor of clinical psychology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. “This was an age when parents didn’t quite know what to do. They felt very guilty. There were all these wild kids, and parents were really looking for some guidance.”

Ironically, Ginott was childless--until he married for the second time and moved in with his wife, Alice, a psychoanalyst, and her daughter Mimi, 13. An older daughter, Roz, was away at college.

It was 1970, long before stepfather issues reached public consciousness, but Ginott was extremely concerned about Mimi’s privacy, her mother, Alice Cohn, recalled. “He wanted her to feel comfortable living with a strange man while her sexuality was budding.”

But Mimi rejected him at first. “I was angry. . . . I felt they had both betrayed my father. He let me be angry for a year. Years later, I said, ‘Haim, why were you nice to me? I was horrible.’ He said, ‘It showed me how much you loved your father and how loyal you were to him, and I admired that.’ ”

Gradually, she came to adore Ginott. “The kind of support he gave I’d never had from anybody,” she said. “He was always there when I needed him.”

Once after arriving home after a 10-hour flight, he sat down for two hours to talk over a problem she had. He never took off his coat. “He was saying, ‘Right now, you’re more important than anything else. That’s what he did, time and again,” she said.

Sometimes, Kaough said, she challenged his techniques. “I’d say, ‘Oh don’t pull that Ginott stuff on me: I feel blah, blah, blah. . . .’ He’d burst out laughing.”

Ginott never sought “correct” feelings nor perfect behavior. One time, Kaough said, she opened the door for a blind date to discover “the ugliest guy I’d ever seen. . . . My mother’s giving me a look that says, ‘Just go on the date. You can’t back out of it. . . .’ Haim slipped me a $10 bill and said, ‘Get a tummy ache in 45 minutes.’ ”

Once he lost his temper when she cursed in the midst of a kitchen accident. “He was shocked and exploded. Then he apologized. He said, ‘See, I can’t do it all the time either.’

“That was comforting to me. If you see someone else is perfect, you see yourself as less than perfect. When you see someone else as human, you feel better about yourself. Less judgmental.”

Where his followers emphasize techniques, Ginott sprinkled his books with literary references from Tolstoy and often reminded parents that their primary goal was to raise children capable of caring, compassion and commitment.

“He always said if a parent can do 70% of what he was asking, that would be like perfect,” Kaough said.

At 17, she knew he was battling cancer. As he became sicker, he asked her to stay away at college: “I think he probably knew at some level I couldn’t cope with his dying.”

Again, he was right. Ginott’s death in 1973 at 51 was a shock. “He was at the height of his career. He had so much more to offer. There was so much more I felt I needed from him. He was just gone,” Kaough said.

Even after 21 years, she said, “I’m still dealing with it. It was probably the major loss of my life.”

Now, in addition to consulting his books about raising her own children, she said, “Sometimes when I go to bed, I look up and say, ‘Help me, tell me what to do.’

“I always feel he’s up there looking down, watching over us. And I wonder what he’s thinking.”