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by Cary S. Chugh, Ph.D.; 177 pages. Subtitle: When Unconventional Discipline Fails Unconventional Children
If time-limited discipline (say, one minute of time-out for every year of your child's life) hasn't helped in your home, the behavior-limited discipline described here may be worth a try. It involves understanding that release from time-out is a reward, and allowing kids to earn and learn from that reward by practicing what they should have done before they landed in time-out in the first place.
It's about giving kids control over their punishment, and self-control's a good goal.
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Pros
- Offers an alternative to timed punishments that are hard to enforce for spirited kids
- Sticks up for parents who have found no success with traditional discipline
- Adaptations for toddlers may be helpful for parents of kids with developmental delays
- Text is friendly and non-technical
- Boxes at the end of each chapter pull out the "take home" points
Cons
- Like any technique, this will work great for some families and not for others
- Not above telling parents that if his technique doesn't work, they're doing it wrong
- This method isn't ideally suited for kids with language or executive-function problems
- Too many pages spent refuting other theories
- Would have benefited from forms, resources, and an index at the end
Description
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: The Luck of the Draw
- Chapter 3: When Chores Become Wars
- Chapter 4: You're Finally Catching On
- Chapter 5: Behavior-Limited Discipline
- Chapter 6: Working With Older and Younger Kids
- Chapter 7: From Teacher's Pest to Teacher's Pet
- Chapter 8: Helping Kids Learn From Discipline
- Chapter 9: Final Thoughts
Guide Review - Book Review: Don't Swear With Your Mouth Full!
I love reading behavior books. I always wind up with at least a tidbit of advice or an inspiration or an idea that can be combined with another idea from another source to turn into something to try. I'm fascinated by the variety of approaches available these days, and the passion of the people who propose them, and the authors' certainty that each new method is the method to end all methods, and all other techniques are fatally flawed.
What I've learned from all that reading, and from parenting my own unconventional guy, is that no technique is perfect for every kid, each unique child requires a unique approach, and each family is a bundle of temperaments that will require a method only they can fine-tune.
Chugh, a child psychologist, has some good ideas to share about behavior-limiated discipline, an alternative to time-limited discipline. In Chugh's method, parents recognize that there's a reward in play here -- that is, the end of the time-out -- and that it should be delivered in a way that reinforces good behavior. So the time-out ends not when the timer dings, but when your child agrees to perform the task he avoided, and in fact practice it several times over so that complying is an easier choice the next time.
I like the way this gives kids control of the punishment, since self-control is something we want our kids to learn. I'm not crazy about how talky the technique seems to be -- lots of explaining things and expecting children to think through and verbalize their actions and consequences, making it an iffy technique for kids with language problems and executive-function deficits. And I'm sad that Chugh felt he had to spend the first half of the book knocking down other techniques and "so-called experts." Some of that stuff has worked for me. And for unconventional kids, "whatever works" works.
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