Contents
Cathy Glass
Happy
Kids
The secret to raising well-behaved, contented children
Contents
Introduction: Why?
CHAPTER ONE First Years
Toddler and the Terrible Twos: 1–3
CHAPTER TWO Preschool
CHAPTER THREE More Techniques
CHAPTER FOUR School
Big Fish in a Little Pond: 9–11
CHAPTER FIVE Factors Affecting Behaviour
CHAPTER SIX Difficult Children
Turning around a Difficult Child
CHAPTER SEVEN Not Your Own
Others who Look after Children
CHAPTER EIGHT Other Factors
CHAPTER NINE Metamorphosis
Pre-teen and Early Teen: 11–15
CHAPTER TEN Grown Up
Conclusion
Remember
Index
Why another book on child rearing? The idea came from my readers. After the publication of my fostering memoirs I received thousands of emails from parents and childcare workers around the world. They sent their love and best wishes for the children I had written about, and also praised me for the way I had managed the children’s often very difficult behaviour:
I tried that method and it worked …
What a good idea …
My son used to be very controlling so I handled it as you did and (amazingly) he stopped.
I’d never thought of dealing with my daughter’s tantrums that way before …
I now talk to my children rather than at them.
You should write a book!
Their comments made me realise that the techniques I use for successfully changing children’s unacceptable behaviour were not universally known – indeed far from it. I wasn’t sure I knew what I did, only that it worked. So I began analysing how I approached guiding, disciplining and modifying children’s behaviour, the psychology that lay behind my techniques and why they worked. This book is the result.
As a parent you want the best for your child: you want them to be a happy, self-assured individual who can fit confidently into society. As a parent you are responsible for making that happen. There will be others involved in forming your child – teachers, siblings, friends, relatives, etc. – who will have some influence on your child, but ultimately your son or daughter will be the product of your parenting, good and bad.
I often feel it is a great pity that, as parents, we are not given training in the job of child rearing. No other profession would unleash an employee on a job without basic training and on-going monitoring, but when we become parents, the baby is put into our arms and, apart from a few words of encouragement from a kindly midwife and weekly trips to the clinic to weigh the baby, we’re left to get on with it. We’re supposed to know what to do, having somehow absorbed along the way the contents of volumes of baby and child-rearing manuals, and the accumulated knowledge of a century of child psychologists. The most important job in the world is left to ‘instinct', without a single course on the techniques of child rearing. Little