Elegant Parenting: Strategies for the Twenty-First Century

Rating:
Summary: A refreshing perspective on parenting.
Review: Elegant Parenting presents clever, emotionally savvy ways of getting to know your child, listening well, engaging cooperation, and extinguishing irritating behaviors. The authors focus on "pacing," or getting a good understanding of what your child is doing and why. They also offer stragegies from their own experience and from other parents of how to use "pacing" to direct or redirect behavior. The book offers a refreshing perspective on parenting, one that emphasizes behavior-shaping through knowing your child and individualizing interventions, rather than focusing on trite notions of discipline or punishment that are unlikely to work for all children anyway. One problem with the book is that since it is based on a seminar that the authors taught and consists of written details of class discussion. As a result, it lacks organization and a cohesive thesis or argument. Still, if you have the patience to plod through the book, reading dialogue after dialogue, you're likely to emerge with a new perspective on parenting and "discipline."

Rating:
Summary: A refreshing perspective on parenting.
Review: Elegant Parenting presents clever, emotionally savvy ways of getting to know your child, listening well, engaging cooperation, and extinguishing irritating behaviors. The authors focus on "pacing," or getting a good understanding of what your child is doing and why. They also offer stragegies from their own experience and from other parents of how to use "pacing" to direct or redirect behavior. The book offers a refreshing perspective on parenting, one that emphasizes behavior-shaping through knowing your child and individualizing interventions, rather than focusing on trite notions of discipline or punishment that are unlikely to work for all children anyway. One problem with the book is that since it is based on a seminar that the authors taught and consists of written details of class discussion. As a result, it lacks organization and a cohesive thesis or argument. Still, if you have the patience to plod through the book, reading dialogue after dialogue, you're likely to emerge with a new perspective on parenting and "discipline."