YOUR JOURNEY TO SUCCESSFUL PARENTING

Rogers draws on her 32-year career as a clinical psychologist to offer a comprehensive approach to parenting young children.

In this guide, the author expounds on a series of treatment recommendations that aim to bring new insights to parent-child relationships and the earliest years of institutional education. Her book is broken up into four parts, first looking at the basics of problematic issues and behaviors and ways to address them; she then offers a long discussion of the challenges faced by parents and teachers when dealing with children with behavioral issues. Finally, the book looks at rarer and more concerning situations that may arise and how to deal with them. Rogers tackles instances of random disobedience, but this is just one of dozens of specific scenarios in these pages. About battles over bedtime, for example, she identifies multiple potential motivations; the child may view the situation as a power struggle, or they may simply be anxious. She's sympathetic to the kids involved, often asking readers to see things from their perspective. Why do children misbehave in stores, for instance? From their perspective, she asserts, shopping is boring, adults ignore you, you’re not allowed to touch anything, and “you get shut down when you try to pick something you want.” She puts forward strategies for dealing with getting children to clean their rooms or stopping a child from repeatedly interrupting others. She also addresses the “learned helplessness” of kids who always expect help and therefore never learn new and complex things on their own.

The comprehensiveness of Rogers’ advice is impressive and deeply involving, and the book as a whole makes for engrossing reading—even for those who’ve never spent a single hour around a moody, temperamental child. (Indeed, many of situation-calming techniques outlined here would work equally well with immature adults.) The author’s tactic for dramatizing virtually every scenario she puts forward—complete with simulated dialogue between caretaker and child—works with direct, unobtrusive efficiency, but the broader discussions are equally enlightening. At every turn, her breakdowns of the best approaches to tense or sticky situations is compassionate, even when she’s recommending strict responses, as in cases of children trying to manipulate adults: “By eighteen months,” Rogers writes, “every self-respecting baby can tell who in the family is the easy touch”; sometimes, she says, the way to counteract this behavior in older children is to establish that if manipulation is attempted, choices revert instantly to the worst options. Even here, Rogers offers a nuanced perspective, noting that occasionally kids are grateful for the strictest option, as it sometimes gives them an excuse for getting out of something they didn’t really want to do. This element of sympathy is at its strongest in the book’s latter sections, some of which deal with helping children to navigate their parents’ divorce, while others deal with the extremes of early teen mood swings. In every chapter, the book resonates with the author’s long experience, and readers will appreciate her calm wisdom.

A sweeping and pleasingly empathetic guide to the problems of childrearing.