Amazon.com Review
Product Description
In this down-to-earth guide, parenting expert Michele Borba offers advice for dealing with children's difficult behavior and hot button issues including biting, temper tantrums, cheating, bad friends, inappropriate clothing, sex, drugs, peer pressure, and much more. Written for parents of kids age 3-13, this book offers easy-to-implement advice for the most important challenges parents face with kids from toddlers to tweens.
- Includes immediate solutions to the most common childhood problems and challenges
- Written by Today Show's resident parenting expert Michele Borba
- Offers clear step-by-step guidance for solving difficult childhood behaviors and family conflicts
- Contains a wealth of advice that is easy-to-follow and gets quick results
- Author has written outstanding parenting books including Building Moral Intelligence, No More Misbehavin', Don't Give Me that Attitude, and more
Each of the 101 issues includes clear questions, specific step-by-step solutions, and advice that is age appropriate.
Top Ten Proven Parenting Solutions
Content from Dr. Michele Borba
Here is just a sample of the hundreds of proven and simple tips from Dr. Borba’s latest book,
The Big Book of Parenting Solutions. The best news is that these solutions work for all ages, take less than a minute to do, are based on proven research and when consistently used will reap lasting change.
1. Get attention: Lower your voice almost to a whisper and then say your request. Kids aren’t used to a quiet request.
2. Increase positive behavior: Research shows that giving kids the right kind of praise (called “positive reinforcement”) is one of the best ways to shape new behavior. So, catch your kid doing the action you want. Just make sure your praise is specific and tells your child exactly what he did right. (Adding “because” or “that” takes your praise up a notch. “I’m so impressed that you started your homework all by yourself this time.”)
3. Stretch persistence: Praising the child’s effort (“You’re working so hard”) and not inherent intelligence (”You’re so smart”) is proven to enhance perseverance and performance, but the child is also more likely to bounce back from a mistake—all because he feels success is not mixed.
4. Reduce fear: Expose your child to a fear in small manageable doses and help them develop a statement to speak back to the worry (“Go away worry!” or “I can do this!”)
5. Curb a tantrum: The longer you give attention to a tantrum the longer it lasts. Ignore, ignore, ignore!
6. Nurture kindness: Encourage your child to use the Two Praise Rule everyday. “Say or do at least two kind things to someone.” Random acts of kindness really are catchy!
7. Increase assertiveness: Stress: “Look at the color of the talker’s eyes.” Using eye contact helps kids appear confident. Strong body posture also helps a child be less likely to be bullied.
8. Friendship builder: The two most commonly used traits of well-liked kids are “smiling” and “encouraging.” Reinforce those traits in your child to boost his friendship quotient.
9. Develop healthy eating habits. Eating relaxed family meals regularly enhances kids’ psychosocial well- being, boosts grades and deters behaviors like smoking and drinking and eating disorders as well as teaches the child healthy eating habits.
10. Curb nagging. Say "no" the first time and don’t back down. The average kid nags nine times knowing the parent will give in.
From Publishers Weekly
Borba, author and
Today Show regular, employs a cookbooklike approach in her latest volume: rather than read through the entire tome, parents can flip to topics pertinent to their family. Borba opens with a friendly overview, noting that contemporary parents feel more stressed and find their roles increasingly difficult (June Cleaver, she points out, didn't have to deal with cyberbullying or Facebook). With characteristic wit, Borba identifies the seven deadly parenting styles, including helicopter, buddy, incubator, bandage, paranoid, accessory parenting (judging themselves by their kids' accolades) and secondary parenting (relinquishing power to such outsiders as marketers or the media). In nine sections on family, behavior, character, emotions, social scene, school, special needs, day-to-day and electronics, the author urges readers to roll up their sleeves and get back to basic, instinctual parenting. As she tackles 101 issues ranging from sibling rivalry, lying and peer pressure to cell-phone use and TV addiction, Borba helps readers identify the reason underlying the behavior or problem, and work with 10 essential principles of change. With her no-nonsense yet compassionate voice, Borba once again delivers an indispensable resource for parents of toddlers to 13-year-olds.
(Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
