 | The No-Cry Discipline Solution: Gentle Ways to Encourage Good Behavior Without Whining, Tantrums, an rating:  asin: 0071471596 binding: Paperback list price: $16.95 USD amazon price: $11.53 USD |
Hey kids! It's another MotherTalk blog tour!*
I love books with index-like chapter set-ups. Maybe it's the ADD, maybe it's because I used to write tech support materials. I like to go straight to the thing I want to do or the problem I want to solve and read how to do it--right then. THEN I'll go back and read the rest of the book that you're supposed to read first. I don't want to know how TCP/IP works, I want to know how to upload a file.
So when I got "The No-Cry Discipline Solution," the first thing I did was flip straight to the sleep problems section. Josie and Lou will stay up all night if we're not careful. (In fact, more than once I've gotten up to use the bathroom at 4 am and there's Josie, reading.) And the first thing that leaped out at me from that section is this:
Don't keep doing what you're doing if it isn't working.
Elizabeth Pantley doesn't come right out and say it in so many words, but "The No-Cry Discipline Solution" is about PARENTAL discipline, not child discipline. When parents are disciplined enough to maintain routines and understand their children, child discipline follows. Yes, once again we have to model the behavior we expect. It's so unfair!
Pantley is probably most famous for "The No-Cry Sleep Solution," the answer for parents who reject the "cry it out" advice that most of us get. In her new book, she walks parents through the basics of making a peaceful home and then the specifics of 33 different parenting dilemmas, from "Baby Talk" to "Yelling, Screaming and Shouting."
She also, blessedly, does some myth-busting right off the top, my favorite busted myth being that if you're a perfect, attached mom you won't have any discipline problems. This was my own assumption, an easy one to make if you do too much reading before you have kids. As one of her test dads says, boy was I wrong!
Pantley employed more than 160 families around the world to look over her manuscript, try her solutions and offer feedback, and you'll find great insight among their comments, like this, from a dad named Ole:
I am always surprised to see how some parents' lifestyles have become so busy that they don't notice the signals that their children are sending to them. It often ends in frustration for both the parent and the child, when the issue could have been easily avoided.
And again, while Pantley doesn't come right out and say it, I will: Slow down. This time is short.
*What that means is, I got a free copy of the book and a $20 Amazon gift certificate for reviewing it, in full disclosure.
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