Smart Love: The Comprehensive Guide to Understanding, Regulating and Enjoying Your Child - Softcover

Martha Heineman Pieper; William J. Pieper

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0615439349 ISBN 13: 9780615439341

Publisher: Smart Love Press, 2011

Synopsis

Smart Love is a caring and patient approach to parenting created and tested by the husband-and-wife team of Dr. Martha Heineman Pieper and Dr. William J. Pieper. It replaces the old rewards-and-punishments style of parenting parenting as behavior modification which turns parents into disciplinarians, which they don t want to be, and which treats children as miniature adults, which they aren t. Smart Love enables parents to understand the world through the eyes of their child at each stage of development. To Smart Love is to cultivate children s inner happiness while managing their behavior in age-appropriate ways, which ensures that children will grow up well behaved, responsible, self-confident, and able to reach their full potentials.

About this title

Review

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

About the Author

Martha Heineman Pieper, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist who works with children and parents, and serves as a consultant to agencies and other mental health professionals. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Radcliffe College, she earned her doctorate at the University of Chicago. She recently wrote the first children's book based on Smart Love principles, Mommy, Daddy, I Had a Bad Dream! The book entertains children while it shows them how to understand and master their bad dreams.  It also provides parents with loving and effective strategies for responding to children who wake them in the night with bad dreams.  William J. Pieper, M.D., is a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who also works with children and parents and consults with other mental health professionals. His B.S. and M.D. degrees are from the University of Illinois. The Piepers also wrote the popular self-help book, Addicted to Unhappiness: Free Yourself from Moods and Behaviors that Undermine Relationships, Work, and the Life You Want.  The Piepers' decades of experience as professionals and their pathbreaking research into the causes and effects of children s inner happiness form the foundation for this book. Smart Love is the guiding principle for Smart Love Family Services, a not-for-profit agency that provides psychotherapy services, parent education, and toddler and preschool programs. Parents of five, the Piepers live in Chicago, Illinois.

Edition details

• Publisher: Smart Love Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0615439349
• ISBN 13: 9780615439341
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 272