Gordon - Parent Effectiveness Training

Parent
Effectiveness
Training

Contents

AUTHORS NOTE : To make the book more gender neutral and to avoid the awkward he or she construction, I have alternated he and she throughout these chapters when I refer to both parents and children.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my first daughter, Judy Gordon Verret. It was she who gave me the opportunity to test and validate the effectiveness of the Parent Effectiveness Training skills in my own family. Later, as a young adult, she interviewed scores of parents who had taken the P.E.T. course. Her reports provided me with many examples of the effectiveness of the P.E.T. skills in families. It is also because of Judy that today I can enjoy being a grandfather to her two wonderful, loving P.E.T. kids.

I want to thank my second daughter, Michelle Adams, for assuming much of the responsibility for updating this thirtieth anniversary edition of the original Parent Effectiveness Training book. She, too, was a P.E.T. child who validated the positive communication and conflict-resolution skills of P.E.T. Like Judy, Michelle was never punished. Often her friends would ask her what it was like in our family, and she would respond, Our family has no boss. We make the rules together. It is very fulfilling as a parent to see how many close and enduring friendships she has.

I also want to acknowledge my wife, Linda. Although she came from a family that used punishment frequently, Linda adopted the nonpower parenting of P.E.T., and she is an excellent listener. She is loved by Michelle and me, as well as her many friends.

Linda has written two books, one that shows women how to take responsibility for their own lives and another entitled Be Your Best, which applies the P.E.T. model to all relationships.

I want to express my deep appreciation to all the P.E.T. instructors, both in the United States and around the world, who have dedicated themselves to helping parents learn these peaceful, democratic, and nonpunitive ways of raising their children.

Finally, I want to express my thanks to Elizabeth Rapoport, my editor at Crown Publishers, both for letting me know the importance of P.E.T. in her own family and for suggesting that it was time for an updated edition of this book.

Preface

P eter Wyden insisted that I write this book. When I resisted, he did a sales job, telling me that such a book could change the lives of parents, help them raise more responsible, self-disciplined children, and, in case that wasnt enough inducement, hed help out by personally editing the manuscript. He had written several books and was the publisher of hundreds, so I figured he knew what he was talking about. He did. The book became a best-seller. It helped change the lives of millions of people, spawned hundreds of other books about parenting, and, according to the Pew Foundation, was the model for many of the 50,000 parent training programs in the United States and who knows how many in other countries.

The model that I developed and describe in this book has, over the years, become a part of the way we all talk about communicating and resolving conflicts. Almost everyone nowadays has heard of Active Listening, I-Messages, and no-lose conflict resolution. Early on, we learned that this modelknown as the Gordon Modeldoesnt apply just to parent-child relationships: It applies in all relationshipsat home, at work, at school, and in the world at large. Its terminology can be found in psychology texts, books, and courses for business leaders, in adult education courses, and, in fact, everywhere interpersonal communication and conflict resolution are important topics.

Over the years, I came to realize that as people use these methods and skills, their relationships become more and more democratic. These democratic relationships produce greater health and well being. When people are accepted, when they are free to express themselves and can participate in making decisions that affect them, they enjoy greater self-esteem, are more self-confident, and lose a sense of powerlessness thats always present in autocratic families.

These are also skills necessary for world peace. Democratic families are peaceful families, and when there are enough peaceful families, we will have a society that rejects violence and finds warfare unacceptable.

Something I didnt think about when I was writing the book was the stream of life. I simply didnt look into the future far enough to see that kids raised with P.E.T. skills would not only grow into healthier, happier adults, but they would also become democratic parents themselves, continuing the cycle of nonviolence into another generation. It has been very gratifying to me to have lived long enough to have talked to many young people whose grandparents brought P.E.T. into the family.

A friend of mine once said, Every person is granted at least one grand, positive surprise in life. I suppose my lifes grandest positive surprise is that Peter Wyden was right. Not only has P.E.T. spread across America but also the book has been published in thirty languages with more than 4 million copies now in circulation and the program has been introduced in forty-three countries. Thats not just a grand surpriseit is extremely gratifying.

We have discovered that P.E.T.s major concepts and skills are as valid now as they were nearly four decades ago when I taught the first P.E.T. course to a group of seventeen parents in a Pasadena, California, cafeteria. All thats changed is the need. Its grown larger and more significant as more and more studies support the finding that spanking, hitting, and other forms of violence in the home cause violence in society. The book you hold in your hand has remedies for home violence and brings, instead, peace and democracy.

In the years since that first P.E.T. group, public opinion has made a remarkable shift. In 1975, almost 95 percent of the American people supported corporal punishment of children at home and at school. Recent polls indicate that less than half the people now hold that belief, and the number who still support corporal punishment continues to fall rapidlyand Im thrilled about that.

It is my sincere wish that reading this book will be a rewarding and enriching experience for you.

DR. THOMAS GORDON
Solana Beach, California

Parent
Effectiveness
Training

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