Getting Off The Naughty Step
Today is publication day of my book with Eliza Fricker – When the Naughty Step Makes Things Worse. It’s the culmination of a journey of working together which started when we met in a café in Hove and decided to try running some low demand parenting webinars together – for children for whom conventional parenting techniques made things worse.
The book came out of our shared frustration with the lack of resources that reflected our own parenting experience. We both felt that books and materials we had found or been given seemed to assume that children could be moulded and got ‘under control’, if only their parents could get it right. That wasn’t our experience.
When children didn’t respond as expected, the advice was ‘be more consistent’. Effectively, continue with what wasn’t working, but do it more. When that didn’t work, it made parents feel terrible about their parenting. It meant, it seemed to me, that the parents who were doing the hardest work felt worse about their parenting abilities.
We also knew that many parents have a stack of books they haven’t read. There is very little opportunity to read when your children need you all the time. For that reason, we wanted our book to be easy to flick through, with lots of illustrations as well as being down-to-earth and relatable. We wanted stories of real-life parenting to give hope to those for whom each day felt like a struggle.
We wanted parents to know that they weren’t the only one for whom the Naughty Step (or Time Out, or sticker charts) made things worse.
Now that book is finally here. We hope you enjoy it, and if you buy it before Oct 9th you can get a free webinar ticket. The webinar is called Is It All My Fault? and details of how to claim your ticket (plus recording) are here.
Hope to see you there.