“I wish I had thought of all this earlier,” the father told me about a year into our work together. “So many professionals advised us to use the system of time-outs and punishments and rewards, and it all seemed so logical. And they quoted impressive data, like a ninety percent reduction in difficult behavior. Who wouldn’t want that? But I didn’t see the bigger picture. We don’t want to ‘craft our child’s behavior’ . . . we want to help our son develop into a good person. We want to understand him, to help him with the things that feel bad to him. It never occurred to me that our earlier
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