This is another book that came up multiple times when I asked for recommended gentle discipline reading. Abram went to the trouble of getting it for me ILL. I took it on our car trip to TN, and I was disappointed to find that my precious book-on-a-car-trip space had been taken up by a book I didn't even finish the first chapter of (yup, ended with a preposition -whatcha gonna do?).
Discipline Without Distress (Judy Arnall, 2007) reads like a bad high school term paper (you know - no original ideas, lots of poorly organized cataloging, and no real direction or point). Arnall has a prescriptive approach, and spends lots of time telling the reader what you should do and think. She spends countless pages describing in painful detail things that any resonable adult should be expected to know (half a page on what might make a parent feel angry - Really? You think I don't have any idea what might make me angry?) and what anyone with internet access or a basic child development book (including many a mainstream parenting self-help book) could easily find.
I have limited time, and I need real tools that can be applied in a varitey of situations. This book just didn't cut it for me. There might be some gems in it, but having read a bit and scanned the rest, I am not willing to mine for them. If you are looking for a good GD book, I'd pass on this one and see my Wordsmith Wednesday post from last week instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment