Table of Contents
Praise from childcare experts, parents, and the media forLoving Your Child Is Not Enough
Nancy Samalins Loving Your Child Is Not Enough is a child-rearing classic that belongs on the bookshelf or, better yet, on the night table of every parents home. Her discipline advice, shared with wit and compassion, is absolutely brilliantguaranteed to make the challenge of raising happy, loving children a lot easier.
Ann Pleshette Murphy, author of The 7 Stages of Motherhood
I can recommend this book to every parent because it offers invaluable information to guide a child with full respect.
Dr. Alice Miller, author of Drama of the Gifted Child
Nancy Samalin is one of the first people I turn to when I need information about raising children. Loving Your Child Is Not Enough filled with insights and practical advice. I use it all the time.
Lawrence Kutner, Ph.D., Ask the Expert columnist, Parents magazine
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing Loving Your Child Is Not Enough. I am reading it for the fourth time, and my husband has also started reading it. It is wonderful! Your book has given me the tools and confidence to be the kind of mom I want to be.
mother, Cypress, Texas
Thank you for your beautiful book.... I found your suggestions for dialogue between parent and child a powerful tool for my professional, as well as personal, use.
mother, Newport Beach, California
A real-life approach.... Loving Your Child Is Not Enough doesnt fall into the guilt provoking category. Instead, it offers a smorgasbord of alternatives for parents who are having conflicts with children from the toddler stage on through adolescence.
Dixie M. Jordan, Parents Press
When I discovered your marvelous book ... I was filled with regret that I had not had it to read twenty years ago (I am a mother of three grown children). It is the simplest, least ambiguous, yet very profound presentation of parenting issues I have seen.
mother, M.S.W., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Just finished reading your book and it has been a turning point in my life. Using your techniques really does work. My son even commented today to me, Mom, you seem more understanding lately.
mother, Bristol, Rhode Island
Loving Your Child Is Not Enough is my favorite book on the hardest issues parents face today.
Vicki Lansky, author of over twenty books on parenting, including Practical Parenting Tips and Feed Me, Im Yours
Nancy Samalin understands how to promote discipline through cooperation and compliance, and how to do it day in and day out. Her book helps parents immeasurably.
Ellen Galinsky, President and co-founder, Families and Work Institute
Readers will be eager to try out the lively, practical, and down-to-earth suggestions for achieving a kind of discipline that really does work. As Nancy Samalin urgesstart by recognizing your childs feelings and then take it from there.
Dr. Louise Bates Ames, Gesell Institute for Human Development
PENGUIN BOOKS LOVING YOUR CHILD IS NOT ENOUGH
Nancy Samalin, a pioneer in the field of parent education, has worked with parents, educators and health care professionals throughout the U.S. and abroad since 1976. She has been giving speeches and offering introductory and advanced workshops for parents of toddlers through teens for more than two decades. The founder of Parent Guidance Workshops in New York City, Nancy Samalin received her Masters Degree in counseling from Bank Street College. Her four highly acclaimed and bestselling books include Loving Without Spoiling: And 100 Other Timeless Tips for Raising Terrific Kids, Loving Your Child Is Not Enough: Positive Discipline that Works, Loving Each One Best: A Caring and Practical Approach to Raising Siblings, and Love & Anger: The Parental Dilemma, which was chosen by Child magazine as The Best Parenting Book of 1991.
Nancy is a frequent guest on national TV and radio, and has appeared on DatelinelNBC, 20/20, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, CNN and many others. She has also been a keynote speaker and lecturer at many corporations throughout the U.S. and Canada, including IBM, Time Warner, Aetna, American Express, Pfizer Inc., Merck & Co. Inc., Arthur Andersen, Goldman-Sachs, and J. Walter Thompson. She has spoken at countless schools, universities and institutions, and in 2000 received the Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in the Field of Education from Bank Street College. Nancy is the mother of two grown sons and lives in New York City.
Martha Moraghan Jablow is the author of A Parents Guide to Eating Disorders and Obesity and Cara: Growing with a Retarded Child. She is the co-author of Understanding Your Childs Temperament (with Dr. William B. Carey), Teenage Health Care (with Dr. Gail B. Slap) and One in a Million (with Harry A. Cole). She wrote the introduction for the 1992 reissue of The Child Who Never Grew by Pearl S. Buck and has written for national magazines and newspapers.
To Sy, whose love, faith and unwavering belief in me have been a source of joy and growth for all the time we have been together.
PREFACE
Since Loving Your Child Is Not Enough was first published in 1987, the feedback Ive received has been extremely gratifying. So many parents and professionals whom Ive met at talks and workshops throughout the United States and Canada tell me repeatedly that the dialogues and anecdotes on these pages ring true: That sounds just like my daughter and me.... Have you been inside my house with a tape recorder? ... I didnt realize other parents struggled with the same frustrating daily battles that I do.... I thought I was the only one whose kidmuch as I love himdrives me up the wall more often than I care to admit.
The reason that these examples resonate with readers is that the words and feelings come from actual parents who have attended my workshops over many years. In these sessions, parents bring in dialogues that they have had with their children, and we talk about how to improve their communication. (To protect their privacy, I have changed their names and any details that might identify them, but the spirit of their dialogues remains true.) In this book, you will find suggestions and solutions for everyday problems that come from parents themselves. They have learned new ways to listen to the way they talk to their children. Theyve developed skills to rethink the impact of their words and re-frame their responses.
Something must be working right because dog-eared copies of Loving Your Child Is Not Enough are passed from parent to parent, grandparent to parent, friend to friend. The book has been translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese, and is available on audiotape from Penguin HighBridge.
When I began to consider what might be added to the original edition of Loving Your Child Is Not Enough, I realized that the situations discussed in Chapters One through Ten really have not changed very much since 1987. Parents are still stumped and frustrated by sibling squabbles, daily battles about bedtime, homework, messy rooms, and the morning madness of dressing, eating, and rushing out the door. They continue to be perplexed or guilt-ridden by their own feelings of angerand sometimes even furytoward the children they love so much. They still want to discipline them without screaming, bribing, nagging, pleading, threatening, or hitting. They still struggle with that tricky balance between holding on and letting go so that their children can become independent and responsible.
