Kids Are Worth It!: Giving Your Child the Gift of Inner Discipline in API Reads

May 04, 2015 Dory rated it it was amazing

Shelves: parenting

Our job as parents is not to control our children, but to teach & guide them. To teach them how to think, not what to think, so that they learn how to be functional, respectful, thinking adults.

I just finished reading this book for the 3rd time - I read it first several years ago before I had any kids, and now have read it twice since the birth of my own child. I have read (& continue to read) a lot of parenting books, and books of the science of brain growth. I keep coming back to this book Our job as parents is not to control our children, but to teach & guide them. To teach them how to think, not what to think, so that they learn how to be functional, respectful, thinking adults.

I just finished reading this book for the 3rd time - I read it first several years ago before I had any kids, and now have read it twice since the birth of my own child. I have read (& continue to read) a lot of parenting books, and books of the science of brain growth. I keep coming back to this book as the "if you read only 1 parenting book, read THIS one." http://www.kidsareworthit.com/uploads...

Unlike many parenting books on the market, this is not a personal theory that hasn't really been tested on kids or maybe only tested on the author's kids - these tools were developed & tested on hundreds of kids, many of them being "special needs" or "difficult" kids. (To quote from her website: Her uniquely effective parenting and teaching strategies were developed through her years of training in sociology, special education, and philosophy, as well as field-tested through her experiences as a classroom teacher, laboratory school instructor, university instructor, seminar leader, volunteer in Rwanda, and mother of three grown children."

Even though the author does not use the following terms, her parenting tools absolutely fit under parenting styles of "Gentle-Parenting" & "Grace-Based Discipline" & "Attachment Parenting."

The author stresses the importance of giving children as much choice as possible at every stage of life, because it is by having choices & making decisions that children learn how to make good decisions. Things like creating a choice where there isn't choice (at bedtime, rather than "put your PJs on now." The parent can ask "Do you want Mom to help put your PJs on, or Dad to help?") By giving kids choices, we give them ownership of their lives & of what happens to them. Having ownership (control) of themselves effectively diffuses rebellion before it begins. Or, as the author points out, children will always rebel - either in little steps throughout toddlerhood, or all at once as teenagers. You can't choose IF your child rebels, only when.

I have personally seen the effective of this approach with my own dau. While all the parents around me talk about how "no" is their toddler's favorite word, I have a 2-yr old that is strong-willed, independent, happy, energetic & yet rarely does she respond with "No!" While No is definitely a word that children need to hear, using it too much causes it to lose meaning & value, so the author offers 3 alternatives: "yes, later" (hard for them to fight a yes, and later can be 5 sec later or 5 days later); "Give me a minute" (which can allow the parent time to think through the child's request & give a good response instead of a fast but wrong response); and "convince me" (which requires the child to think through the issue themselves & come up with reasons to change the parent's mind - which, in turn, teaches the child how to THINK instead of just acting on their wants). ...more

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