Customer Reviews

Instead of Medicating and Punishing: Healing the causes of our children's acting-out behavior by parenting and educating the way nature intended

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This important book will open your eyes to new ways of thinking about parenting and educating our children. It's not just about so-called "difficult" children, but about each and every child and how best to support their development and self-fulfillment from babyhood to adulthood.

In a dozen chapters and four appendices Ms. Couture guides us through such topics as how to change our child-unfriendly culture and ways to overcome the negative aspects of industrialization. She explains how to develop and maintain the "Human Attachment Cycle," and how school and day care can harm children and be destructive to parent-child attachment.

There are chapters on child trauma and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), foster care, institutional care, and adoption, with excellent guidance on how to heal these traumas.

Chapter 12 includes a summary of the book, plus ideas on how to become a child advocate, and an extensive list of resources and books for further reading.

Ultimately, this book is a guide to granting children their basic rights to feel safe, loved, and supported. If all children were treated as Ms. Couture advocates, we would live in a much more peaceful world.

This book has proven very useful in my volunteer work with children.

As an advocate for natural parenting, I loved this book. There is no denying the relationships that Laurie presents between the undesirable ways in which children behave and the lack of parental attachment and bonding. I think most parents know, at some level, that the influence of mass media and culture that shapes the way they parent their children is causing devastating harm. The problem is......they themselves were raised this way and many are hopelessly caught up in living unauthentically.....which perpetuates the cycle. It's too bad that so many "third world" countries are now trying to mimic our western lifestyle, which includes bottle feeding instead of breast feeding, hospital births which deny early bonding along with over medicating, idolizing and believing anyone they see on TV. They don't realize it now, but they are forever changing their societies and their children for the worse. Hopefully, more authors like Laurie, will continue to write about what they know to be the truth, and the movement will gain momentum and cause wonderful changes for future generations.

This book goes far beyond the scope of the typical "how-to" parenting book. It brings to light how many of the choices we make as parents, which are often viewed in this culture as normal and necessary, hinder the development of a healthy relationship between parent and child. The author (who is a therapist) makes a powerful case that "attachment disorders" are endemic in today's society and are the root cause of most emotional/mental health issues children experience. As one example, she describes how sending a child to school all day can disrupt the parent-child bond and harm children's development in other ways. There is a particularly eye-opening section where she prints e-mails she has received from many parents describing how schools denied their children the right to go to the restroom when they needed to, often with traumatic results for the child. "Not only are children away from their most important relationships for most of the day, their basic needs and their higher level learning needs are not being met....Over the years, parents watch their once upbeat children become emotionally sullen, distant, anxious and sarcastic." Yet, Couture writes, too often the response to a child who is "acting out" is punishment and/or medication. Couture, an adoptive parent, also delves into attachment disorders that can stem from adoption and the foster care system. Fortunately, the book contains concrete strategies for parents to help them heal their relationships with their children, no matter how old. As a parent whose son had a difficult time in public school, and who has been working hard to strengthen our relationship, this book struck a strong chord with me. I hope it finds its way to enough parents and educators that more attention will be paid to the real causes of children's distress in this society, rather than looking for easy but ineffective solutions.

This book very clearly outlines the behaviors of a child with unmet needs. I see these behaviours now as alarms alerting me to look deeper to find the unmet need rather than judging it as "bad" or "negative." And the more i do this the intensity of the behavior is less as they trust i will be there and listen. When i had my first child the only information i was exposed to involved encouraging your child to be "Independant" by letting them cry alone in a crib ect. My heart was aching but it was all i knew.Then when exposed to the bliss of attachment parenting i went through an intense period of guilt. It was at this point i read Lauries book. I found it sooo helpful as she devotes a laege section of her book to repairing the damage and reparenting. Wow it was like music to my ears and i felt like i had a second chance. I used it and it truly worked. The information on the schooling system was alarming. As a homeschool family it serve to reaffirm our decision but for schooling families it is "must know" information. It is abook i wish evey parent was given as soon as they conceive. Thankyou to Laurie A.Couture for writting "Instead of Medicating and Punishing."

The books addresses some of the basic dysfunctional methods of childrearing and teaching of children. I was appalled at the dogmatic insistence upon restricting the use of the toilet at school for children when the same adults can use the toilet whenever they need to.

My son was 4 months old when I bought this book. Obviously no one wanted me to medicate him but I had recently become interested in Natural parenting and this book looked really interesting to me. I was not disappointed. The beginning chapters discussed how a secure child-parent attachment could help me avoid many behaviors that society looks to remedy with medications. The information about attachment parenting gave me confidence in my parenting style. People in my life often commented on how often I held my son, how quickly I attended to him and "babied" him, how he slept with us and how often I breastfed, so on and so on. This book solidified my own beliefs on how "toxic" our society is and how backwards it is when trying to raise a child.

There is so much valuable and thorough information in this book for new parents, "experienced" parents, parents with children in school, for children whose parents were told to medicate them. This book really made me think about how I want to parent my child, it made me question the school system and I am currently educating myself on other "schooling" options. I thank Laurie for writing this book and I am confident that with the information in this book I will raise a happy child. Already at 10 months old, I get so many comments on how happy my baby is (sometimes amongst the criticisms) and I know it is because we have and are establishing a good parent-child attachment with the help of Laurie's book.

Laurie Couture is a passionate advocate for children and speaks eloquently to the need to nurture the relationship between parent and child. Many books which address the adoptive parent/child bond are written by therapists, or by parents, but since Laurie is both she comes to the subject from a particularly well informed perspective. Much of her advice is excellent advice in all parenting situations.

This book is my bible. Whether your kids are having issues in school, or if you are home educating or even just considering it, I recommend reading Laurie's book and keeping up with her on her blog. I was so unsteady starting out in home education three years ago and this book is my ROCK. Not only for the valuable information in it, but also for the powerful foundation of love that I felt in every page.

I love that attachment parenting has such a powerful defender in Laurie A. Couture. In this day of "edutainment" and peer orientation, the deep intuitions of parents on how they should raise their children is often silenced or pushed aside. Reading "Instead of Medicating and Punishing" is a validation of what is the natural and instinctual way of being a parent. Despite the media shower of early childhood recommendations to begin schooling children as young as possible, you can't deny what is the only thing that feels right for your precious babies - keep them close and with you for as long as possible.

This book is filled with practical tips for addressing behavior problems with children as well as real-life examples and solid science to back up attachment parenting methods. After reading this book, I not only saw an immediate change in my child, but felt a change in myself and my perspective on parenting. Every parent and teacher on Earth should read this book immediately.

A timely and important book, Instead of Medicating and Punishing offers parents sound advice on attachment parenting, with emphasis on meeting children's needs. When children's needs for care, sound parent-child attachment, stimulation, learning, freedom and play are met, they are far less apt to engage in behaviors that call forth the medicating and punishing response in caregivers.

Based on research of peaceful indigenous tribes around the world that stand in contrast to our industrialized, corporatized society (reliant on daycare and school as substitutes for parental care), Instead of Medicating and Punishing covers all aspects of child care and healthy child development. It is development that can be short-circuited through reliance on psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin and other pharma remedies for behavior that is called overactive or disruptive, especially in school classrooms.

Laurie A. Couture, the author, is an attachment parenting and unschooling advocate, and creative mentor to parents and others seeking advice on family issues. Her approach combines the best of nonviolent caregiving with freedom for children to grow naturally and become the people they were meant to be. This is not achieved through punishment or pharma palliatives that can adversely affect children's development, but through attention, attachment, care and love, at the same time that children are given freedom to explore and learn at their own pace.

Couture's book stands alongside other outstanding testaments to good child care, including Jean Liedloff's the Continuum Concept and Leandre Bergeron's For the Sake of Our Children. These remarkable books tell the story of natural parenting and natural child growth, free of coercion, artificial constraints, punishment and reward behaviorism and other manipulative means of control. It can be an invaluable resource to parents and everyone who is involved in caregiving.

Please ignore the 1 star review. That person has not even read this book and is completely wrong about the content and the philosophies of the author, she has no idea what she is talking about. Her 1 star review is an attempted attack over a childish blog post dispute. Laurie A Couture is inspiring and her writings have been a blessing to my life and parenting skills. This book is enlightening and fascinating, bringing us back to the simplicities of life and learning and love. You would do yourself a favor to read her work.