Does your child whine too much of the time? Does he continue to throw temper tantrums long after the terrible two’s should have passed? Is “NO!” her favorite word? Does he keep demanding what he wants until it drives you crazy? If you have answered yes to any or all of these questions, I have a few suggestions for you, depending on the age of your child. If you are the parent of a new baby or toddler, The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How to Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful, and Cooperative One- to Four-Year -Old, by Dr. Harvey Karp is a good place to start.
Harvey Karp, MD., is an assistant professor of pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine, and a parent himself. He helps parents understand the world from the point of view of the toddler, using the metaphor that toddlers are little cave people with undeveloped language and logic, ruled primarily by their emotions and basic needs. He divides toddler behavior into three categories: “green light” behaviors, which are positive and should be encouraged; “yellow light” behaviors, which are the annoying but not completely unacceptable things toddlers do; and “red light” behaviors which are unacceptable because they are either dangerous or they disobey a key family rule.With great humor and a gentle touch, Dr. Karp gives specific suggestions for encouraging the positive and eliminating the negative behaviors common to this stage.
If your child has survived toddlerhood but not yet hit adolescence, then another book may be helpful. Written by Richard Bromfield, a child psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, the book is called How to Unspoil Your Child Fast: A Speedy, Complete Guide to Contented Children and Happy Parents. Rather than merely offering tips for more effective discipline, Dr. Bromfield first looks at the reasons why parents overindulge their kids in the first place, describing the gradual process by which parents become more and more ineffective with their children. He also clearly lays out just what is at stake if parents allow the slippery slope of spoiling to continue. The book then offers a 12 point checklist so you can see where you might be going wrong and target specific areas for change.
Based loosely on the seven deadly sins, Bromfield describes the seven deadly syndromes and then gives tools for how to deal with them. Examples are dealing with the syndrome of self-centeredness, what to do with a “slothful” unmotivated child, or how to address the “greedy” child who doesn’t want to share. Much of the book will appeal to the general reader’s good common sense and will serve as a good reminder that being a good parent often means stepping back and allowing children to work hard, experience pain, toil, and reap the rewards of those experiences.
If you are turning towards parenting books, I’ve found you need a variety of them to find some approaches that may work with your child. This one is good to have in your library, even if everything in the book doesn’t work with you. For instance, I think the Fast Food Rule and Toddlerese concepts are good, but I just couldn’t get them to work with my two year old. But the book has some great ideas on little things to do to help the day to day life with a toddler. I use a lot of the ideas like the star charts, hand checks, and time-ins . One thing that is good about this book is that he does emphasize positive reinforcement, which I’ve found does help shape behavior of a willful toddler. One thing that is annoying is his constant saying that this book is so great and if you follow my advice, everything will be perfect! The pages of quotes from parents who used his techniques and had them work right away can be frustrating if you’ve tried the same thing on your kid and it doesn’t work. But, like I said, it does contain a lot of different techniques and ideas to try, so it’s still worth a read.
Some of the advice in Karp’s book is very different from other books. For example, he really emphasizes making compromises, and in at least one example encourages some white lies. Not exactly the type of advice I expect from a parenting book. But this also made it more realistic than other suggestions I’ve read about raising a toddler. Toddlers don’t have the logic skills of an adult, and realistically you have to pick your battles.The most interesting part of the book to me, and the main reason I think that this book is worth reading, is about talking at your toddler’s level when he or she is upset. Karp points out that parents are usually very comfortable talking in toddler-ese when their child is happy, but when their child is upset they try to talk in a calming voice. This backfires, because they are using complex sentences, long words, and a monotonous voice that can be hard for a toddler to understand. So the toddler gets even MORE frustrated and upset. I thought that his solutions for dealing with this problem were well worth reading.I haven’t read the old edition.