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How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen
4/5. That rarest of rarities, a parenting book that isn’t either fundamentally crap or something done in 80,000 words that should be done in 3,000. This is useful, practical, and realistic. It also has, get this, examples in every single chapter featuring disabled children. Is that even allowed? The bulk of parenting media would say absolutely not.
On a basic level, though, the authors of this book share my values (somewhere in the respectful/gentle parenting space, but with a very practical bent) so this landed just right at the right time. Have I mentioned Casterbrook has turned three and is, uh, very gloriously loudly worriedly explosively brilliantly independently three? If you want a testimonial, I had been talking to him for days about a repeated power struggle we’ve been having, and I was getting nowhere. So I implemented a suggestion in this book – having the three of us sit around the table and each come up with multiple solutions to help him do the thing he did not want to do, with my wife writing them down in a numbered list, and notating them with stars and crossings out etc. as we weighed our options. And I’ll be damned, but this book was dead right that pre-literate and quasi-literate children absolutely lose their minds over having their ideas written down like that, and it turned the whole situation around.
4/5. That rarest of rarities, a parenting book that isn’t either fundamentally crap or something done in 80,000 words that should be done in 3,000. This is useful, practical, and realistic. It also has, get this, examples in every single chapter featuring disabled children. Is that even allowed? The bulk of parenting media would say absolutely not.
On a basic level, though, the authors of this book share my values (somewhere in the respectful/gentle parenting space, but with a very practical bent) so this landed just right at the right time. Have I mentioned Casterbrook has turned three and is, uh, very gloriously loudly worriedly explosively brilliantly independently three? If you want a testimonial, I had been talking to him for days about a repeated power struggle we’ve been having, and I was getting nowhere. So I implemented a suggestion in this book – having the three of us sit around the table and each come up with multiple solutions to help him do the thing he did not want to do, with my wife writing them down in a numbered list, and notating them with stars and crossings out etc. as we weighed our options. And I’ll be damned, but this book was dead right that pre-literate and quasi-literate children absolutely lose their minds over having their ideas written down like that, and it turned the whole situation around.
