An Ounce of Prevention: How Parents Can Stop Childhood Behavioral and Emotional Problems Before They Start

Rating:
Summary: unfair to the gifted children
Review: "many psychologists have concluded that underachievement in gifted children frequently stems from too much attention paid by one or both parents, leading to a sense of entitlement." This quote from the book is not only untrue but also harmful to the gifted and their parents.

Rating:
Summary: Not completely unhelpful
Review: During the course of this book, Dr. Shapiro did give me a lot to think about in terms of my child's emotional health. That's about it. It's loaded with statements about what you ought to do with your child - for instance you be firm about your child's eating habits, but take his/her preferences into account - with few or no examples about just how one should go about doing these things. There are some chapters that are better - the chapter on dealing with children's fears is not bad - and some that are worse. Infomation for younger children is scanty, and often didactic, or worse contradictory. One chapter says to respond quickly to your crying infant to give him/her a sense of some control, another says to delay responding to your crying infant so that (s)he can learn to self-calm. These may both be accurate statements, but if the author is going to assert both, than he needs to make some attempt to reconcile the two. I.e. Under what circumstances would one delay responding to a crying child? At a particular age? With a particular personality type?

Last, but certainly not least, Dr. Shapiro pays lip-service in the introduction to balanced parenting, saying that neither permissive nor authoritarian parenting is good for children's emotional health (Certainly true). However in the body of the book, all his diatribes are reserved for the permissive parents, and all his references to dictatorial parents are in the past, as if such things don't occur today. Certainly overly permissive parents exist, but the dictatorial parent is a long way from being a thing of the distant past.

You might browse it at your local library if you're really interested. Don't bother buying it.