Smart Love: The Compassionate Alternative to Discipline That Will Make You a Better Parent and Your Child a Better Person

Parents and experts tend to be divided into two embittered camps: strong discipline and permissiveness. How about another choice? Now comes Smart Love: The Compassionate Alternative to Discipline That Will Make You a Better Parent and Your Child a Better Person, a book exploring Martha Heineman Pieper and William J. Pieper's alternative approach to raising responsible, smart, loving children. The authors are longtime experts in child and family psychology. She's a psychotherapist who works with both children and adults, and he's a child psychologist and psychoanalyst. Together, they've raised five children while professionally researching the roots and keys to children's inner happiness. Their "Smart Love" approach to child rearing will provide a breath of relief for parents uncomfortable with formal methods of discipline, but deeply concerned with providing their kids with strong, safe limits.

Focusing in turn on babies, toddlers, young children, older children, adolescents, and kids with special circumstances (including adoption and learning disabilities), the Piepers argue effectively that "tough love" doesn't work, and that parents will get more cooperation if they focus on their child's inner happiness and "avoid unnecessary confrontations with children about behavior for which they will eventually assume responsibility." While this approach may initially feel radical to some, the Piepers' clear explanations and force of research and practice will win converts to their gentle, strong approach. The Piepers write, "Time-outs, restrictions, punishments, and other forms of discipline are based on the assumption that being too nice to children who are 'misbehaving' will encourage and reward bad behavior." Instead of discipline (or permissiveness), the authors recommend that parents parent by "loving regulation," an alternative approach to out-of-control behavior that stops the behavior immediately but doesn't deprive the child of parental warmth or admiration. Smart Love will help parents raise confident, resourceful, and compassionate children. --Ericka Lutz