Book 5 of my 2014 Goal

Discipline without Shouting or Spanking: Practical Solutions to the Most Common Preschool Behavior Problems by Jerry L. Wyckoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am always interested in ways to improve my relationship with my grandchildren so I do read a lot of these self-help or how to books for that reason. I came across Discipline without Shouting or Spanking: Practical Solutions to the Most Common Preschool Behavior Problems by Jerry Wyckoff PhD & Barbara C. Unell and figured I would see what they suggest. Truthfully, I wasn't holding a lot of hope for practical solutions because just as the tons of other books I read, they just didn't have anything practical for a real world situation. They drown you with data about this study and that one but it really don't mean much to me because the study itself is faulted and set up from the beginning to slid one way or another. What I wanted is a common sense solution, and the know how to execute any discipline in a real time, real life situation. Lets face it, children can and will act up in a store, on a bus, on the sidewalk, just about anywhere and everywhere so techniques where you have to run home and sit them in their time out chair in the corner with the egg timer is just not practical. Somewhere out there, there has to be something that works and can be used and I found this book to be one of the best.

I thought it was fantastic that they remind the parents that they operate on a different timetable then their children and each child's ability to learn is different. This to me is a very strong statement and one all parents need to understand. As well as parents must model the behavior they want their child to understand. So basically, if you want your child's behavior to change than you may need to start with your own. After all, if a child sees you screaming and hitting every time you get mad, they will imitate you and do the same. A very undesirable outcome. However if you have empathy and explain that you are sorry that little Joy choose to hit. Explain how it hurts when someone hits and that there were better ways to handle the situation such as sharing the toy, then it would have been a better solution. Even praise Joy for sharing the toy. Which is one of the examples in the book.

The book does cover quite a few circumstances Preschoolers do and explains the best was to handle it. Naturally depending on the behavior, depends on how to handle it. But I was glad to see it was something that can be used at home or even if your out at a picnic.

It even covers the problem we are going through right now which is my grandson getting out of his bed in the middle of the night and prolonging bedtime as well. He'd want to go to the bathroom, get another drink of water, etc. Then about 3 in the morning he would leave his bed and run into his mom's and dad's room and try and hop into bed with them.

The book itself is written without typos (or if there were any, it certainly didn't take away from the information) and the behaviors are in chapters so you don't need to flip through all the pages to get to "Talking Back", you can just flip to that chapter and read. It is easy to understand and written without a bunch of scientific terms.

Will the book help everyone? Probably not, everyone is different and maybe some can't or won't respond to this but it is sure worth a try. As I said, I didn't expect much out of this book but was pleasantly surprised and I will be using some of theses suggestions myself.


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