Bad Attitude: Reverse Your Child's Rudeness in 1 Week-with Food - Softcover

Audrey Ricker, Ph.D.; Brian L. Cabin, M.D., M.D.(H).

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1579545904 ISBN 13: 9781579545901

Publisher: Rodale Books, 2002

Synopsis

A dietary guide to improving the mood of children features strategies for bringing children on board the new diet, which uses healthy foods to reduce rudeness, laziness, apathy, self-centeredness, and other behavior problems. Original. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Audrey Ricker, Ph.D., is a mother, teacher, researcher of child behavior, and the New York Times best-selling author of books on discipline and parenting. She teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Brian Cabin, M.D., M.D.(H)., is a pediatrician, general practitioner, and nutrition instructor and is board-certified in homeopathy. He is a clinical lecturer in the department of medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

From the Back Cover

"An absolute must for parents of difficult children... I will recommend it to all my patients." --Bruce Roseman, M.D., author of A Kid Just Like Me: A Father and Son Overcome the Challenges of ADD and Learning Disabilities

"Food is one of the main culprits behind our kids' behavior and their health. Congratulations--this is one message that desperately needs to get out. Take it from me, this idea works." --Fred Pescatore, M.D., author of Feed Your Kids Well and Thin for Good

"Delightful...practical...puts parents firmly in charge..." --William G. Crook, M.D. Emeritus Fellow, American Academy of Pediatrics Author of The Yeast Connection Handbook

What did your child eat today? Discover how and why food may be causing your child to feel miserable and behave badly. Whether it's talking back, fatigue, aggressiveness, or poor attention, nutrition may be the answer.

When combined with simple strategies for discipline from Audrey Ricker, The New York Times best-selling author of Backtalk, simple changes in your child's diet can put him back on the path to good behavior, enduring health, and a positive attitude--in as little as 1 week!

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

There's one very simple reason behind my passionate determination to write the book you are reading now:

The discipline methods in my previous books didn't always work.

As coauthor of two other books on children's behavior, Backtalk: Four Steps to Ending Rude Behavior in Your Kids and Whining: Three Steps to Stopping It Before the Tears and Tantrums Start, I thought I had a handle on stopping rudeness in kids. The advice in these books is based on psychological principles and literally tends to work like magic. When a child is rude, whiny, or displays other unwanted behavior, the parent enacts a consequence that the child dislikes. The child will, in order to avoid facing the consequence again, stop that behavior. Many, many readers told me that this simple idea had changed their lives for the better, put them in charge of their homes again, and made their children treat them with respect. (I'll provide a new version of methods like these in chapter 7 of this book so you can try them yourself.)

But I began hearing from some parents who did everything these books advised and still were unable to stop their children's rudeness. "The strategies you recommend in your book are useless with my child," one mom said. "I've taken all kinds of privileges away from my son as consequences for his backtalk, and still he is terrible to me. Frankly, I've run out of any new consequences to use!" Other parents said the consequences they imposed stopped their children's rudeness for a few hours, but no longer. Still others reported that the consequences had stopped the backtalk for a week or so, and they had thought the problem was solved. But soon, the rudeness would begin again, causing the parents to feel as though nothing had been accomplished. My coauthor, a trained Adlerian psychologist, attributed these failures to parental "misapplication" of the advice in our books. There may have been some truth to that, but I knew the answer was just not that simple. These parents deserved a better answer than that.

Clearly, some kids' rudeness was beyond the control of any ultimatum, consequence, or other behavioral strategy. What on Earth, I agonized, was going on with these kids who couldn't be helped by the strategies that had worked so well for others?

A Parent's Intuition

As I was pondering the question of this unexplained rudeness, I thought back to my own experiences raising my son. I recalled that he had been unbearably rude at times--until I noticed that he acted especially awful when he ate anything with sugar in it or drank any sugar-sweetened, artificially colored beverage. That kind of physiological response to foods heavy in sugar or refined carbohydrates ran in my family, so I hadn't been surprised that my son was the same way. I quickly learned to restrict the amount of these foods in his diet--something that significantly improved his behavior and, I believe, did a lot to help him lead a happy, productive life.

Could diet also be a factor in the rudeness of the children whose parents had written me? I suspected it might. And I was sure that these weren't isolated cases.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rodale Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1579545904
• ISBN 13: 9781579545901
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 214