Excerpt from Picking Your Battles
Excerpt in Parenting Magazine and Parenting.com
An excerpt from Picking Your Battles was featured in the August 2004 issue of Parenting Magazine and online at AOL's Parenting.com. Read it online here:
Additionally, we are pleased to present you with the introduction and table of contents of the book, below.
It’s 7:59 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Sanity Is?
“If you don’t put on those pants in one second, you can get on that school bus naked!” When you read these words you should immediately imagine a mother, or more precisely, a woman who was formerly a mother before the blood in her veins started to seethe, before the eyes in her head began to bulge, before her voice cracked the sound barrier, before she morphed into a deranged, “I have got to get this kid into pants or he’ll miss the bus and I’ll be late for work and my boss will have a fit” lunatic, than the good-natured mom she usually is.
It is 7:59 a.m. and you have spotted the large banana-yellow vehicle rounding the corner toward the house. For the last hour, besides making breakfast, finding school lunch money, grabbing clean socks out of the dryer, locating misplaced school books, signing permission slips, and trying to get ready for your own job, you have been unsuccessfully trying to get the pants on your youngest son.
Forget the pants! Suddenly, with the bus driver honking his final “I am fed up waiting again” honk, dragging the lovable tyke onto the bus in his Barney-Fruit-of-the-Looms seems like a mighty real possibility. What a way to start the day! It isn’t even eight a.m., and you are fried to a crisp.
Can you conjure up this vision of “former mom?” No? Then save your money and return this book.
Now, for the rest of us… Even if the scenario is not precisely yours, any real parent can easily picture this scene because at one time or another everyone has turned into a parental lunatic. We battle with our toddlers, skirmish with our pre-schoolers, clash with our pre-teens, and wage war with our adolescents. And no matter when or where the combat takes place, the results are invariably the same: aggravation, irritation, frustration and exasperation.
Kids, bless them all, seem to have an extraordinary capacity for finding endless ways to drive parents to distraction. And it is teeth-gritting, jaw-clenching, muscle-tensing episodes like this that make life as a parent difficult and trying. But it doesn’t have to be that way!
This is a book about making life as a parent easier. It is about learning to pick your battles. It is about developing a strategy for addressing these inevitable conflicts with children - successfully. Not all battles are well waged or worthwhile. More often than not, battles resolve little they seem intended to address and instead get endlessly replayed. All too often they make things worse. But picking your battles is not the same as advocating a free-for-all. It is not about throwing out the rules or throwing in the towel. Rather it is about understanding which battles are necessary and how to wage them adaptively. It is a way to make anger work for, rather than against you and your child. It is a way to create healthy, happy, and decent children, while at the same time retaining your sanity.
Table of Contents
Preface: Truth in Packaging
Introduction: It’s 7:59 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Sanity Is?
Part I: Preventing Unnecessary Battles
A Crash Course in Child Development
A Commonsense Parenting Philosophy
Creating Family Policy
How to Eliminate No-Win Discipline
Part II: Surviving Hassles and Headaches: Strategies and Tactics
Rules of Engagement: Setting Limits
Put an End to Whining: Developing Your Child’s Self-Discipline
Helping Your Child Get Very Good at Being Good: Continuing the Development of Self-Discipline
Developing Your Child’s Moral Compass
Empathy and Limits in Action: How to Gain Cooperation and Good Behavior
Getting Good at Getting Angry: Discovering the Positive Power of Parental Anger
Implementing No-Nonsense Discipline
Getting Through a Day: Winning Tactics for Surviving the Hassles and Headaches of Everyday Life
Encouraging Cooperation in Kids: Using Practice Tactcs
A Few Last Words