Over the 25 years I’ve been a psychologist and the nearly 20 years I’ve been a parent, I’ve read many parenting books. Here are 10 important take aways from 10 of my all time favorite books.

1. Effective discipline is kind and firm. Positive Discipline, by Jane Nelson.

Parents tend to be focused on empathizing with a child’s feelings – that is, they are “kind” – or focused on setting limits on a child’s misbehavior – that is, they are “firm.” In couples, often one parent is the kind one and the other parent is the firm one. When a child’s behavior becomes especially challenging, things can quickly worsen if parents fight over whether the best response is empathizing with the bad feelings that lie behind the bad behavior, or setting limits on the child’s misbehavior. Jane Nelson, in Positive Discipline, suggests that effective discipline is not kind or firm, but both kind and firm.

2. Emotion Coaching parents raise emotionally intelligent kids. Raising and Emotionally Intelligent Child, by John Gottman.

There has been a mountain of research over the past few decades demonstrating that emotional intelligence is a crucial capacity to have if one is to live a happy and successful life. Gottman’s research on families shows that parents who are “Emotion Coaches” raise children with higher emotional intelligence — that is, they are capable of calming their emotions, focusing their attention, and are skilled at navigating the complexities of human relationships. Related to Jane Nelson’s view, Emotion Coaching Parents are kind and firm. Emotion Coaching is a four step process:

• When their child is upset or misbehaving, Emotion Coaches first focus on understanding their child’s emotional experience.

• They listen empathically and validate their child’s feelings.

• They help the child find words to label the emotion he or she is having.(The steps above are the “kindness”)

• They set limits while exploring strategies to solve the problem at hand. (This is the firmness).

3. Kids do well if they can. The Explosive Child, by Ross Greene.

When our children don’t comply with our requests, it feels like they aren’t complying because they don’t want to. That is, it’s a motivation problem. So, intuitively we use carrots (rewards) and sticks (threats and punishments) to increase their motivation to comply. This is the “Kids Do Well if They Want To” view. Greene suggests that almost all children want more than anything for their parents to be happy with them. He argues that most instances of noncompliance don’t result from “willfulness,” but rather from a lack of “skillfulness.” When we ask our children to comply with requests that over tax their skills (i.e., skills such as executive functioning, affect regulation, flexibility, etc…) we will get noncompliance. If we insist they comply, we’ll get an explosion. He summarizes this view as “Kids Do Well if They Can.” When faced with a chronic pattern of noncompliance, temper tantrums, explosions, etc., it’s essential for parents to work to understand what skill deficit is preventing their child from doing well.

4. Relationships thrive when the ratio of positive to negative interactions is 5 to 1. Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, by John Gottman.

Gottman found spouses in happy, stable marriages engage in positive expressions of feelings and actions towards each other about five times as often as they engage in negative expressions. He has labeled this 5 to 1 ratio as the “Magic Ratio.” Gottman’s magic ratio is a valuable rule of thumb for parents to apply in their relationships with their children. Children develop best, and parent-child relationships are most harmonious, when parents engage in the expression of positive feelings towards their children about five times as often as they engage in negative expressions such as demands, corrections and criticisms. Parent-child relationships which are consistently positive form the basis for the development of confidence, healthy self-esteem, and resilience. Relationships that are not experienced by children as clearly positive can lead to anxiety, communication difficulties, and problems with discipline.

5. What makes someone feel most loved varies from person to person, The Five Love Languages of Children, by Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell.

People express and receive love in different ways. Chapman calls these differences “love languages” and says there are five: words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. People often make the mistake of expressing love in their own love language without understanding whether that is the love language of the person they are expressing love to. A parent might express love by doing lots of things for their child (acts of service) or buying them amazing things (gifts), but if the child’s love language is quality time, the child won’t feel as loved as the parent intends. Discovering your child’s love language is a powerful way to help them feel loved and valued and develop healthy self-esteem. Expressions of love in the child’s language are powerfully positive and set you well on your way to 5:1.

6. Talking is strong medicine. It needs to be administered in small doses. Between Parent and Child, by Haim Ginott.

It is amazing that Ginott published Between Parent and Child in 1956. It was so far ahead of its time and has served as the basis for many of the great parenting books that followed, such as How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, by Faber and Mazlish and Gottman’s Raising and Emotionally Intelligent Child mentioned above. Ginott suggested that parents talk to (or more accurately at) kids way too much. Children don’t like being questioned about their feelings, or being asked to talk about their bad behavior. How do we know what a child is feeling if we don’t ask? In Ginott’s words “we look at him and listen to him, and we draw on our own emotional experiences.” Our children are relieved and helped when we do the work to figure out what we think they are feeling rather than demanding that they tell us. It’s much easier for them to tell us when we get it wrong than for them to tell us what they feel – they often don’t know and it can feel very exposing to them.

Sometimes we do need to talk with children about their bad behavior. It will go much better, however, if we recognize how hard it is for them to do. It is a negative experience for them, that must be balanced off by 5 positive ones.

7. “How you make sense of your childhood experiences has a profound effect on how you parent.” Parenting from the Inside Out, by Daniel Siegel & Mary Hartzell.

Siegel and Hartzell point out the tremendous importance of reflecting on, and understanding, our own experiences being parented as children. These childhood experiences have shaped who we are — especially our traumatic ones. When we aren’t aware of how our past effects us, we are destined to repeat it — passing our pain and trauma on to our children. A lack of self awareness will especially create problems when feelings run strong. We won’t be able to help our child when they are sad (we rush to “fix it” or dismiss it), when they are angry (we fight against it, or retreat from it), or when they are anxious (we are overwhelmed by it). Knowing ourselves and our emotions helps us not overreact or underreact to our child’s emotions or misbehavior and helps us be the parents we want to be.

8. Having a plan can help us stay calm. 1-2-3 Magic, by Thomas Phelan.

1-2-3 Magic, by Thomas Phelan, describes an approach to child discipline that has the advantage of being very simple to learn and follow. When a child misbehaves he or she gets two warnings before being sent to his/her room for a time out. The “1-2-3” refers to how the warnings are given. When the parent notices that his or her child is engaging in a disapproved of activity, the parent gives two warnings followed by a time out. The first warning is indicated by the parent saying “that’s one.” If the behavior continues, after five seconds, the second warning is given, “that’s two.” Finally, if the behavior continues for 5 more seconds, the parent says, “that’s three” and sends the child to his or her room for a time out.

The disadvantage of the 1-2-3 approach is that it does not address a child’s feelings. The strength however is in its simplicity. Faced with misbehavior, a parent knows just what to do. Knowing what to do makes it much less likely that a parent will act out of anger and frustration with yelling, scolding, criticism, or in some other destructive manner. 1-2-3 gives the parent an always ready emergency procedure to implement. Knowing what to do also makes it less likely that the parent will act inconsistently with discipline. Because misbehavior triggers 1-2-3, the parent is also less likely to ignore an infraction in one instance, or overreact in another. 

9. Catch your child being good. The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child, Alan Kazdin.

All of us as parents, unfortunately, slip into the pattern of ignoring our child’s good behavior — because it doesn’t bother us — while placing a lot of attention on misbehavior. Since kids are highly motivated by parental attention, we are unintentionally rewarding negative behavior with our attention (thereby encouraging it to occur more frequently) and punishing positive behavior by withholding our attention (thereby encouraging it to occur less frequently). Kazdin suggests reversing this destructive dynamic by making a point of “catching” our children being good and rewarding them with attention and praise, while “punishing” misbehavior by ignoring it.

10. Negative labels perpetuate problems. Build on the Strengths. Raising Your Spirited Child, Mary Sheedy Kurcinka.

When we use negative labels to define a child — demanding, stubborn, whiny, wild, manipulative, obnoxious — they set up a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is true even if we never speak our label outloud and it only exists in our minds. Negative labels cause us to interpret a child’s behavior in a negative light and to pay more attention to the behaviors that are consistent with our label rather than those behaviors that contradict it. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka recommends interrupting this self-fulfilling cycle by replacing our negative labels with positive ones. Here are some examples: replace “argumentative” with “opinionated, strongly committed to one’s goals;” replace “stubborn” with “a willingness to persist in the face of difficulties;” replace “anxious” with “cautious;” and “manipulative” with “charismatic.”