James - Love bombing: reset your childs emotional thermostat

Perhaps your child is a bit troubled in just one respect, like a little shy or sometimes over-demanding. Maybe he or she has much more numerous and serious problems, like severe temper tantrums at the age of 10, or being paralysed by groundless fears. Either way, Love Bombing can help.

The childs problem is almost never the fault of parents, who are only doing their best. Because of one misfortune or another, or a chain of them, the childs basic brain chemistry is in need of adjustment, usually only a small one. Perhaps surprisingly, rather than a pill being the best way to achieve this, it is far more effective to give the child a new experience and to alter the way the parents relate to him or her.

One of the most astonishing and significant scientific discoveries of the last ten years is that childrens brains are much more plastic malleable than previously believed. We have an emotional thermostat, and luckily it is a thermostat. Just as you can alter the amount of heating or air-conditioning in your home, so you can adjust your childs brain. Of course, making the change takes more effort than just turning a dial, which is where Love Bombing comes in: you do not have to agonize about what went wrong in the past or beat yourself up about that stuff the joy of Love Bombing is you can just get on with putting things right.

Love Bombing gives your child a very intense, condensed experience of feeling completely loved and completely in control. The period during which this is done can be 48 hours (two nights), 24 hours (one night), a single day, or shorter bursts. Whichever period you use, you subsequently rekindle that experience daily for half an hour. Dramatic shifts result in the childs personality and behaviour. When it comes to dealing with disobedient or shy or clingy or aggressive or impatient children, love and control, it seems, really are the answer. What is more, because so many parents are, or have had periods of, living very busy or miserable or complicated lives, most of us need to reconnect with our children from time to time. Love Bombing does the job.

The method works equally well whatever your social background, ethnic origin or nationality: the fundamental needs of children are the same everywhere. It can be done with no financial cost. It works for nearly all children from the age of 3 years to the early teens.

Originally, I developed the method when making three parenting series for British television (ITVs This Morning ). The producers told me they would take me to the home of a child whose parents were worried about their child. I was to provide the parents with The Answer and two weeks later we would return to find that the problem had been solved!

I admit that I was sceptical that this would be possible with the angry and defiant children they had lined up for me, often from harassed low-income homes. By good fortune, I happened to read a scientific paper at that time which described a much more intense version of the method I eventually developed and which, somewhat to my surprise, worked remarkably well for a very wide variety of difficulties. Over one hundred parents have now followed my method.