In this groundbreaking book, parenting expert and acclaimed author of
the bestselling book Simplicity Parenting Kim John Payne, M.Ed., flips
the script on children's challenging or defiant behavior and lays out an
elegantly simple plan to support parents in establishing loving,
age-sensitive boundaries that help children feel safe and settled. In
short: What looks like misbehavior is actually your children's signal
that they're feeling lost, that they are trying to find direction and
looking to you to guide them back on course.
Payne gives parents heartwarming help and encouragement by combining
astute observations with sensitive and often funny stories from his long
career as a parent educator and a school and family counselor. In
accessible language, he explains the relevance of current brain- and
child-development studies to day-to-day parenting. Breaking the
continuum of childhood into three stages, Payne says that parents need
to play three different roles, each corresponding to one of those
stages, to help steer children through their emotional growth and
inevitable challenging times:
- The Governor, who is comfortably and firmly in charge--setting limits
and making decisions for the early years up to around the age of eight
- The Gardener, who watches for emotional growth and makes decisions
based on careful listening, assisting tweens in making plans that take
the whole family's needs into account
- The Guide, who is both a sounding board and moral compass for emerging
adults, helping teens build a sense of their life's direction as a way
to influence healthy decision making
Practical and rooted in common sense, The Soul of Discipline gives
parents permission to be warm and nurturing but also calm and firm (not
overreactive). It gives clear, doable strategies to get things back on
track for parents who sense that their children's behavior has fallen
into a troubling pattern. And best of all, it provides healthy direction
to the entire family so parents can spend less time and energy on
outmoded, punitive discipline and more on connecting with and enjoying
their kids.
Advance praise for The Soul of Discipline
"The Soul of Discipline offers practical tools for helping parents
implement discipline that's respectful and effective, but the book is so
much more. Kim John Payne offers a framework to guide parents in making
decisions about why, when, and how to hold tighter reins as we build
skills in our children, and why, when, and how to loosen the reins as we
scaffold freedom."--Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D., co-author of No-Drama
Discipline
"This book gets deep inside the challenge of getting along with children
and teens and thinks deeply about what they need from us to become
strong and self-managing. It elevates discipline to what it should be--a
caring process of helping kids orient to the world and live in it
happily and well."--Steve Biddulph, author of The New Manhood
"Kim Payne provides a useful model for choosing our parenting
stance--Governor, Gardener, or Guide--depending on the situation. Most
powerfully, Payne begins with the radical view that children are not
disobedient but rather disoriented. The upshot of this shift in
perspective is that discipline is about helping children orient
themselves effectively, not about controlling or
chastising."--Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph.D., author of Playful
Parenting
