High Five Discipline: Positive Parenting for Happy, Healthy, Well-Behaved Kids

Pediatrician and KIDing Around with Dr. Candice podcast host Jones focuses on “positive discipline” in her uneven debut. While every child needs discipline, she writes, it “doesn’t have to be strict, harsh, or aggressive. Appropriate discipline should be administered with love and a spirit of training or teaching, all to foster the greatest potential in our children.” As such, Jones lays out five principles to deal with conflict effectively and positively: knowledge of child development, good relational health between parent and child, encouraging proper behavior, discouraging and correcting inappropriate behavior, and managing the environment. These are put into practice with examples such as giving children choices when possible and communicating unconditional love even in the face of unacceptable behaviors, and she offers some imagined dialogue between parents and children. While Jones’s advice is encouraging, it’s also all fairly familiar, and some readers will be turned off by her occasionally condescending way of advising adults (“If you know that you have a work presentation at 9:00 am next Tuesday morning, you should prepare”). There’s no shortage of parenting books that take a similar tack, and, unfortunately, little separates this one from the pack. (Oct.)