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The bestselling five-week program to improving the disruptive child's behavior--now updated and revised

Based on more than 40 years of collective research, parents and longtime child behavior experts Dr. Rex Forehand and Dr. Nicholas Long have devised a program to help you find positive and manageable solutions to your child's difficult behavior. Now in a revised and updated edition, Parenting the Strong-Willed Child is a self-guided program for managing disruptive young children based on a clinical treatment program.

This hands-on guide provides you with a step-by-step, five-week program toward improving your child's behavior as well as the entire family's relationship. Providing you with the necessary tools for successfully managing the difficult child, the book covers specific factors that cause or contribute to a child's disruptive behavior; ways to develop a more positive atmosphere in your family and home; actual reports by parents of difficult children; strategies for managing specific behavior problems; how to tell if your child might have ADHD; and more.

Average Customer Rating:

Fantastic book!	Customer Rating:
I highly recommend this book to any parent who has a strong willed child. It is very easy to read. It helps the parent understand how to act and discipline a strong willed child. I never really thought much about positive and negative reinforcement, but every parent needs to know about it...strong willed child or not. In my family this book has proven to be priceless.

This WORKS

Customer Rating:

I bought this book a few weeks back and my husband and I are working through the steps with our 2.5 year old son. Our son has been strong willed since, well, before birth. Even he let his opinion be known and we've struggled through many challenges with him from the very beginning. We'd been able to cope with most everything he threw at us until the last 6 months. As I sit here, I am 35 weeks pregnant, and with the pregnancy fatigue my son has had more freedom than he ever has. We've tried everything with him, but it was definatly to the point of, "Oh, he's not doing anything wrong! Let me just sit here and enjoy it a second... being very quiet so as not to disturb him." I couldn't bring myself to play with him or engage him much just because I used all my energy on discipline. We are currently stalled on week 2 in this book (we had a bug go around the house and desided to wait until we're all back to "normal" before continuing). The changes, already, have been amazing. Just in the first two days my son stopped screeching at me. Apparently, he'd gotten so used to only hearing me reprimand him that every time I opened my mouth he felt the need to drown me out with this awful noise (I would liken it to nails on a chalk board). Now, because I can talk to him the noise level in our house has dropped, he's hearing me and responding to what I say (answering questions and even Following Directions!), his speech has improved because he's putting effort into communicating properly with us, plus, we can bring him out in public. I'm not saying he's a perfect little angel anywhere we bring him, but I've heard the sermons at church for the first time in 2 years. I can take him to do my grocery shopping while my husband is working so that we can do something fun as a family when my husband is home. We even brought him to the mall last night and he left the play areas without fighting us (yes, we had to physically go get him, but that's alot better than dragging him out kicking and screaming.) Oh, and we got dinner at the mall (granted it was a food court) but he sat next to me in the booth through the whole meal, eating his food and talking to us. Did I mention that his average major melt down has gone from 40 minutes of kicking and screaming (and generally making me want to cry/pull my hair out) to 10? Yes, they're still 10 very intense minutes, but hey. 10 is so much better than 40. I'm so pleased with this book, I could go on gushing for a good long while yet. I am so excited to continue on with the progress our family is making.

Excellent resource for overwhelmed parents of intense kids!	Customer Rating:
I am part way through the book and have seen positive results already with my extremely strong-willed 3.5 year old boy. I was at wits end so it is wonderful to find some help! I would highly recommend this book if you are struggling to raise a strong-willed child.

very practical	Customer Rating:
Practical method that really works. First half of the book is a good introduction to simple child psychology that most parents are not familiar with. second half of the book is a step by step program that really works. After reading this book, I discovered, that parents too need to learn how to become better parents.

Finally something that worked!

Customer Rating:

I'm usually skeptical about books that promise "X number of weeks to a better something-or-other" but I bought this book out of desperation when NOTHING seemed to be helping my 2-year-old's out-of-control behavior. Biting, hitting, kicking, throwing things -- you name it, he did it, and usually gleefully. Our inconsistent methods to address his behavior went nowhere. After just doing "Week 1" of the program in this book, which is "attending" to your child's play (essentially narrating what your child does in play), his behavior showed a dramatic improvement. The other techniques described are fantastically effective, and I finally learned a good and consistent way to do time-outs with my 2-year-old. His behavior after only a few weeks is so markedly different that I'm constantly amazed. He rarely hits and never bites now, and he usually stops all other naughty behaviors with only a warning about a time-out; if not, the time-outs actually work instead of being just a waste of time. (Note to other parents: when we started, I felt like I was putting my son in time-out all the time -- that's gone down to a couple of times each week.) And it's even fairly easy now to get him to do things he doesn't necessarily want to do (wash hands, eat lunch, get out of the bath, leave the playground, etc.) -- just by talking to him (no time-out threats needed)! But best of all, I feel like our time together is so much happier and more rewarding. He loves the attention and praise -- I thought I was doing this before, but clearly wasn't doing it enough. I love that there's a way to discipline that's calm and matter-of-fact. There's less shouting and anger and a whole lot more peace and laughter.