Compare with psychological parenting books

Dear parents!

If you have not yet had the confidence in your parenting and hesitate on how good you are at the upbringing of your child, you perhaps are victims of psychobabble, which is widespread in parenting literature.

Even very good books may mislead you because they just may not tell you the important thing, which we are going to explain to you, or they don't emphasize enough that important thing because they can't describe it as an integral beautiful system. Instead, many authors on parenting try hard to write as much practical stuff in order to provide as clear as possible instruction on how to deal with children in specific life cases. It seems to us that this is the best way to gain parental skills. However, this is not true. Failure in parenting usually comes not because you don't have practical skill, but because you don't understand what idea is underlying those practical skills. When your child one day shows a different behavior or asks a question, which is not mentioned in the book, you are lost! Isn't it better to understand a system of happy parenting, and then to see how different authors use it in practice?

In this site we are going to introduce you to the classic parenting book, which is new for English speaking readers. Why do you need it? Just look around! Isn't there enough horrible stories about young people, who seem to have no clue about what is right and what is wrong in their behavior? Do you want your child to become one of them? Of course not, but you can't be sure about that until you gain confidence that you yourself know what is right and what is wrong in your relationship with children. However, many of the available parenting books give you the impression that only the authors know what to do in every particular case. That is what misleads parents. This impression is especially harmful because those authors say the right things! The right things, which don't' work for your child... Instead of acquiring serious knowledge on the laws of upbringing, and confidence coming from this knowledge, brainwashed parents get another list of instructions and another sense of guilt.

The mentality of instructions is widespread. It is like instead of teaching a child to count numbers, to sum and deduct, I will give to the child a calculator and say "You can do it, you have a tool!" In parenting, as in math, parents need to be able to think.

So compare, think, and decide!

Here we have an example of experts (left column) and the Classical parenting point of view (right column).

Remedy for Rudeness

Does washing out your child's mouth with soap work? We explain why the experts say no.

By Sandra Y. Lee

Q: My 4-year-old is talking back and using bad words. Can I wash his mouth out with soap to teach him a lesson?

A: While you might assume such punishment is appropriate, it actually reinforces your child's negative behavior, says Gary D. McKay, Ph.D., a Tucson, AZ-based psychologist and coauthor of Raising Respectful Kids in a Rude World. "When kids do things like that and get a shocked or angry reaction from parents, they feel a sense of power," he says. The more you respond, the more he'll act up.

What you can do: Seem totally unimpressed, says Dr. McKay. Calmly tell your child, "I don't like that kind of language, and when you say those words, I won't pay attention to you." Then expect his behavior to get worse; this is what Dr. McKay calls "the testing period." After a week or two, your child should give up using the rude words because he won't get anything out of it. Above all, says Dr. McKay, you can help by setting a good example and speaking respectfully to others, including your child.

From www.child.com

Though we agree with the expert that says no, we offer readers to compare the reasons "why" would we say no.

According to Simon Soloveychik "we ourselves sow the seeds of evil, nobody else." "The smallest grains of evil – are our rude, careless touches on the sensitive, subtly organized soul of a child, who, we think, doesn’t understand anything and, therefore, will tolerate everything."

Here is an example from the book Parenting For Everyone (book2part1ch40), where he shows how the mother reacts to the daughter's unexpected rude word.

'A healthy and robust three year old girl runs home and shouts to her mother, panting with excitement,

“You, you, you are a witch!”

She heard it on the playground.

How is one to answer this? To beat her so that she wouldn’t dare to talk to her mother in such a way? What would she grow up to be then if she at three years of age can say this to her mother –to her only mother! What is with children now that they can say “witch” to a mother!But the mother replies,

“Wow, my darling,” and smiles, “Do you know who you are to me? You are – my bunny!”

“And you, you are,” the girl is still indignant; “You are … a squirrel!”

That’s it. Emotion disappears. There is no tunnel. There is no evil feeling.

Here is a simple strategy of upbringing – not to counter childish vicious feelings with a vicious feeling of adults, not to create tunnels of evil, and in no way to encroach upon a child. Then those small vicious emotions, caused by grains of evil, which go toward us, will disappear and dissolve. But good emotions will find roots; they will turn to virtues, to the quality of character, which themselves will beat possible faults.'