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Discipline Without Anger: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Children Responsible Behavior: But Doctor, What Do I Do When...?

Jerry Adams, Ph. D.

 FormatISBN Price  
This Book is Available Paperback (6x9)9781434375377 $ 9.90  
About the Book

Child Psychologist Jerry Adams recognizes that many parents rely on restrictions, yelling, or spanking for discipline but that they rarely see lasting changes for their efforts. They are frustrated and discouraged with their children’s behavior, but they are unsure how to make their discipline work.

To help parents effectively discipline their children without relying on punishment, Dr. Adams has written Discipline Without Anger: A Parents Guide to Teaching Children Responsible Behavior. This book provides a comprehensive strategy for teaching children to meet expectations in the first place, rather than waiting for them to misbehave and then punishing them for their misbehavior.

Discipline Without Anger is based upon the author’s work with hundreds of families. The author developed, presented, and refined the approach over nearly two decades of working with children and their parents in his role as a child psychologist in a large health care system.

Utilizing feedback from the parents about what does and does not work, the author provides an effective, loving alternative for teaching children to assume appropriate levels of responsibility for their own behavior. Readers will learn principles underlying child behavior and will also learn detailed steps for developing structured home programs tailored to meet the specific needs and goals of their own families.

Discipline Without Anger is intended for busy parents, whatever their life styles and whatever the ages, types of behavior, and levels of cooperation of their children.

Discipline Without Anger:

· Guides parents to develop, implement, and maintain their own home program;

·   Shows parents how to extend their influence to settings where they cannot be with their kids;

· Gives parents detailed guidelines for ending inappropriate behavior, both at home and away; and

·   Provides parents with numerous examples illustrating how the approach can be adapted to all sorts of situations.
About the Author

Jerry Adams grew up in a large family in northern Iowa and developed an early fascination with how children mature and how they behave. After graduating from Iowa State University, he spent two years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, where he taught high school classes for one year and worked in a Liberian psychiatric hospital for another year. In the process, he was exposed to what is universal in the human spirit and to how culture impacts human development and behavior. To pursue this new awareness, he continued his education and completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Iowa.

Although Dr. Adams, once a tenured associate professor, taught at several universities, his "heart was always in clinical work with children," and he left academia for clinical practice. For twenty-five years, he served as lead psychologist in a very large non-profit health maintenance organization, specializing in assisting children and their parents.

Whenever Dr. Adams gave talks to parents, many remained afterward to ask, "But Doctor, what do I do when…?" about difficult discipline challenges with their own children. Recognizing that neither he nor surely anyone else can provide effective one-minute responses to such challenges, he set about developing a class to provide parents with a comprehensive approach to positive and effective discipline.

"I learned from hundreds of parents who attended my classes what does and what does not work, and I refined my presentations accordingly," he says. Despite extensive handouts which he provided to parents who attended his classes, he added, he was frequently urged to write a book encompassing the entire approach, resulting in Discipline Without Anger.

Dr. Adams, who is married and has two sons and two grandchildren, is licensed to practice his profession in California.
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While there may be lots of easy ways to deal with children’s misbehavior, none is likely to be effective with truly difficult problems and none provides an overall approach for dealing with the many challenges of everyday life with children.

When parents (or other parenting figures, including grandparents, foster parents, and other guardians) ask "What do I do when . . .?" they are reflecting three compelling facts of life:

· That doing a really good job of raising kids is as difficult as anything parents will ever do,

· That raising children is parents’ most important task, and

· That there is little agreement about how best to go about the business of child-rearing.

How true these statements are was clearly shown in a parent survey (discussed in more detail below) which revealed that:

· Most parents relied on some combination of verbal reprimands, restrictions of activities, and spanking in response to inappropriate behavior,

· Over two-thirds of the parents realized that their approaches did not really work,

· Most of the remaining third found that their "successes" did not lead to lasting changes in behavior, and

· Few parents recognized that positive responses to their kids’ appropriate behavior actually has a major role in discipline.

These survey findings provide a discouraging picture of parents working hard to guide their children while relying almost exclusively on punishment which they, themselves, reported doesn’t produce lasting changes in behavior.

Fortunately, when focused well, efforts to provide children with appropriate discipline can produce much more constructive results. My work with parenting classes showed that children respond to parental guidance almost from birth, as part of a natural developmental sequence, discussed at length below. By being aware of the process, parents can build an effective and loving overall approach to parenting, a positive approach that does not depend upon negative reactions from parents.

In fact, in keeping with what parents report from their own experience, a major operating principle of this book is that "discipline" and "punishment" are not the same thing. This principle is based on a great deal of evidence indicating that:

· Punishment is largely ineffective in changing behavior,

· When it does seem to work, the effects don’t last very long,

· Punishment is least effective with kids most in need of help in controlling their own behavior,

· Often punishment distracts parents from their original expectations, so that their kids may serve their penalty and avoid their responsibilities,

· Punishment causes unnecessary and counter-productive anger and frustration in parent-child relationships, and

· Surprisingly often, punishment actually works against the intended goal by rewarding children with attention and a sense of control during inappropriate behavior, making them more, rather than less, likely to misbehave again.

Since punishment is generally ineffective, the central challenge for parents is to understand what does contribute to constructive outcomes in child-rearing, and then to apply that understanding in day-to-day interactions with their children. This book is intended to provide parents with the required understanding, along with a detailed and practical guide for establishing a home program for teaching children discipline.

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