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Entire 30 page
book here:
http://www.adlerbooks.com/Outwitting%20Toddlers%20Proposal.pdf
by Bill Adler, Jr. and Peggy Robin
Adler & Robin Books, Inc.
3000 Connecticut Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20008
www.adlerbooks.com
OVERVIEW
Here’s the problem with toddlers: They’re just old enough to have formed a
separate identity from their parents, and just strong enough to begin to
exercise that identity by doing the opposite of what their parents want.
So the parents, who until now might have thought they had a sweet,
good-natured and relatively helpless baby on their hands, are suddenly
faced with a small but determined adversary whose main word seems to be
"NO!"—and who can run and kick and throw things.
Parents, once
they get over the shock of their first-time confrontation with their
headstrong toddler, quickly realize they need to take action, before the
situation gets out of hand. So what do they do? If they’re of the old
school of parenting, they use their authority, issuing orders and
punishing disobedience. However, most of today’s childcare experts warn
against that approach, telling parents that too many rules and punishments
will squelch children’s spirits and make them feel put down, unimportant,
afraid to try new things.
The standard
parenting guides these days tell you to explain things to your toddler,
try to get them to understand why they can’t take their pants off at the
grocery store or stay up until two in the morning. That sounds good in
theory, but parents quickly discover that logic and reasoning will only
take you so far with a twenty-month-old who is lying on the floor and
screaming at the top of his lungs, "NO DOCTOR!"—when the appointment for
his check-up is in fifteen minutes.
There are those parents who decide not to challenge their toddler’s
contrariness; they just give in to every demand—and usually end up with
children so spoiled that even after the toddler years are long past,
they’re still behaving like two-year-olds.
If it’s wrong to
force obedience, if it’s useless to reason with them, and it’s dangerous
to surrender to them, what can a parent do? Outwit them! Use your superior
brain and adult resourcefulness to come up with a way to get your child to
go along with what you want. The trick is to make your child believe that
this is what he or she really wants, anyway. If you can get your toddler
to cooperate without threats, punishments, or tears, you will give your
toddler a sense of accomplishment and pride in what he or she does. You
will reinforce your toddler’s budding spirit, not crush it—and without
spoiling your child by giving in.
But how do you
outwit them? They may have little experience of the world, but they are
smart. And inventive. And very unpredictable. That’s why parents need
Outwitting Toddlers. In this guide parents will learn a whole range of
clever stratagems, tricks and techniques to try when their little ones
test their limits. Outwitting Toddlers recognizes that toddlers are not
all alike, and that what works well to solve a problem with one type of
toddler may backfire with a different sort of child. For this reason the
book will offer two, and sometimes three or four different possibilities
for the parents to try out as solutions for each of the problems
discussed. Outwitting Toddlers also understands that not every parent is
suited to the use of every type of technique, and so the book considers
how various styles of parenting match up with the different Outwitting
techniques described. For example, a parent who is normally strict might
get better results with a technique that requires the child to act
promptly, while a normally permissive parent might be better off trying a
solution that allows the child to do the required action at a later time,
or in a more interesting and more fun way.
What makes
Outwitting Toddlers so useful—and so different from nearly all the other
childrearing advice books on the market today—is that it is so
result-oriented.
Other books
start out with a particular slant on things. Books by child psychologists
focus on the author’s particular psychological theory of why children
behave the way they do (and so many of them blame the mom for whatever
goes wrong). Books by social critics tend to focus on some fault in the
structure of society: Feminists blame the patriarchal system;
anti-feminists blame working mothers; moralists point to a decline in
social values; and so on and so on. Because these experts focus on the big
picture, they have little advice of value for the day-to-day problems of
parents and toddlers.
Outwitting
Toddlers doesn’t start out with theories and so doesn’t restrict its
solutions to what goes along with any ideological position. This book
tells parents, "Here are some possibilities, try them out, one at a time,
and see what works for you." It’s practical, real-world, hands-on advice,
not abstract theorizing from "experts" who haven’t had toddlers themselves
in a decade or two—or longer.
Outwitting
Toddlers, if it has any ideology at all, is based on the notion that
parenting should be fun—at least much of the time. The advice given is
light, not ponderous; practical, not prescriptive. In addition to
problem-solving for many different parental dilemmas, there will be some
funny stories about toddlers who simply could not be out-maneuvered. There
will be boxed tips, sidebars, bullet lists and other graphic features that
make the book eye-catching and appealing to busy parents in need of quick
and workable answers.
Finally,
Outwitting Toddlers understands that everything is outgrown eventually,
and so toddler troubles should never be allowed to get you down for long.
Because it is written to the needs of today’s parents of toddlers, by
parents with recent experience dealing with everything it covers,
Outwitting Toddlers will be the book that really makes a difference, the
one parents will tell other parents about. As long as there are parents
asking the question, "How do I get my toddler to ….?" we believe
Outwitting Toddlers will be in demand. |
