Discipline Your Kids with Positive Parenting by Nicole Libin, PhD
The author has one child, and that child doesn’t sound very old. The author does have a lot of experience with advising other people how to parent and extensive academic knowledge. However, academic knowledge doesn’t really give the real world experience needed for writing a parenting book.
I have always parented my kids very much like outlined in this book so she was mostly just preaching to the choir. I believe strongly that discipline should come from a place of teaching as the root indicates it should (discipulus is Latin for student or disciple). I have ten children ranging in age from 1 to 21, six of whom are adopted from foster care. Positive parenting has worked beautifully for us.
The thing is, I don’t think if I was just coming to positive parenting or was looking for help in how to parent differently that this book would be all that helpful. It was long on “just connect! it’s worked with my one single child!” and short of actual how to. I understood what she was trying to say to do simply because it’s what I do naturally.
More real world examples (it would have been okay if they came from situations where she was not the caregiver) would have been very useful. The few examples given were just her parenting her daughter. As anyone with more than one kid knows some kids are just naturally easier to parent than others so examples from one child don’t indicate at all that this way of parenting will work with all kids (I know it does, but it does take time and effort).
The constant focus on “self-care” was completely unnecessary and took away from the usefulness of the book. It repeatedly mentioned mindfulness (the author is a “mindfulness educator”) but didn’t really explain what she meant and just seemed like a bit of psychobabble and use of a buzzword.
I do not recommend this book to people who are interested in learning how to parent positively. There are many other better books on the subject out there.
2 (out of 5) Stars
Books Read in 2021: 17
Pages Read in 2021: 4721
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