Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline: The 7 Basic Skills for Turning Conflict into Cooperation
Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline: The 7 Basic Skills for Turning Conflict into Cooperation
Learn how to stop policing and pleading and become the parent you want to be.
You love your children, but if you’re like most parents, you don’t always love their behavior. But how can you guide them without resorting to less-than-optimal behavior yourself? Dr. Becky Bailey’s unusual and powerful approach to parenting has made thousands of families happier and healthier.
Focusing on self-control and confidence-building for both parent and child, Dr. Bailey teaches a series of linked skills to help families move from turmoil to tranquillity:
- 7 Powers for Self-Control to help parents model the behavior they want their kids to follow. These lead to:
- 7 Basic Discipline Skills to help children manage sticky situations at home and at school, which will help your children develop:
- 7 Values for Living, such as integrity, respect, compassion, responsibility, and more.
Dr. Bailey integrates these principles in a seven-week program that gets families off to a good start, offering plenty of real-life anecdotes that illustrate her methods at work. With this inspiring and practical book in hand, you’ll find new ways of understanding and improving children’s behavior, as well as your own.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars the only parenting book needed
Ms. Bailey explains that parents need to learn self control before they can discipline their children, but understanding her assumptions and making simple attitude adjustments will create the values in your children that matter most.
2 Stars Not really positive discipline
My major beef with this book is summed up in this little quote on pg 189 “Loving guidance requires a shift from the reliance on punishment and rewards to a reliance on consequences in order to help children learn from their mistakes.” My problem with it is that the “consequences” she suggests are actually almost all punishments. She suggests grounding, sending a child to his room for the rest of the day, making the kid eat dinner alone, and more. I would sum up her advice by saying this, “Here’s a whole bunch of stuff you can try before you punish, but if that doesn’t work to make the kid obey you, go ahead and use punishment to motivate them to comply with your requests.” The worst part is that on the surface, she makes it SEEM as if she’s saying the opposite. It’s not about punishment, it’s about learning. You can’t make people do things, you can just make them “want to choose” to do what you want (by making them unhappy if they don’t, if no gentler method works). It seems as if the author is ultimately afraid to actually take her own advice.
There is some good stuff in here, particularly the “self-help” part (hence 2 stars), where she goes through disciplining yourself first so that you can model the kind of behavior you want your children to emulate. However, Marshall Rosenberg’s “Principles of Nonviolent Communication” does a much better job of teaching many of these same skills, and you won’t have to wade through the contradictory parenting advice to get it.
If you’re looking for a book to give you alternatives to rewards and punishments and to help get you out of a cycle of power struggles with your kids, Larry Cohen’s “Playful Parenting” or Mary Sheedy Kurchinka’s “Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles” are both much better choices. They both give many more options for ways to change your interactions with your child to make power struggles less common AND options besides punishments and rewards when the power struggles do arise.
5 Stars Great tool!
This book really makes you think about how you are talking to your children, why you treat them the way you do, and how to make real changes to build a more healthy relationship through constructive, loving discipline.
3 Stars I wish she treated parents the way she asks us to treat our kids
I want to be the best mom I can be for my children. There are many good tips for achieving this in this book, most revolve around modeling the behavior and tools I wish to imbue with my child. However, this book begins with the premise that traditional roles are bad, and that they place children in a position of subservience. She compares these roles to racism, as well. I am a homemaker, and I most certainly am not subservient to my husband! My children will grow up with us showing them how to respect all people, and that relationship begins with respecting their parents and siblings. Rules are guidelines that give the kids boundaries so that they can blossom and grow. The book begins with the assumption that parents are the bad guys–and I believe this because of the way that the author talks down to us. If she used the same kind of loving language to encourage us and bolster our confidence that she wished for us to use with our kids, while explaining how good behavior and habits encourages our children, then it would be a lot easier to digest. As is, I smell a stinker–she is not practicing what she preaches. We are to act as God’s stewards of our children and show respect to all people, and I hope that the author learns respect for adults, as well–even the parents who have not grown up with the kind of love and self-respect it takes to pass on to their children. I do not want to see parents chastised for something that they couldn’t help. They need to be loved into seeing the truth of how to relate to their kids. Adults are still the kids they used to be– I love the book “I Love You Rituals” by this same author, I wonder if she wrote it later? Even authors have a journey of evolution and self-discovery! God bless her, she has the children’s best interest at heart.
4 Stars Wonderful Ideology and Examples
I love this book and recommend it often! The only reason I give it a 4 is that chapter 11, which is supposed to show you how to apply the principals taught in the rest of the book, falls very very short in my opinion. It confused me. I feel that she contradicts herself. This chapter just does not fit with the rest of the book for me. That said, the majority of this book presents a lot of really great ideas that make total sense! The examples she gives throughout the book are also excellent and prove that there is practical application for these ideas even if the chapter dedicated to that purpose does not exemplify this fact.
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