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Summary: Improve your parenting skills; Improve your child's behavior
Review: Gerald Paterson and Marion Forgatch provide practical, useful and effective suggestions on how to improve your parenting skills and thereby improve the behavior of your children. Replace negative, coercive parent/child interactions with more positive, reciprocal interactions. Volume I covers basic family managment skills: how to give effecitve instructions, how to set up household rules, how to design and implement a basic point system and so on. Part 1 teaches parents how to respond to specific adolescent behaviors and establish consequences that result in changes in their child's behavior. The principles in this book work well with kids aged 8 through 16. Some suggestions may not be as helpful for older teens, 17-18 years old. It's better if you read the book now, when your child is 8,9, or 10 than wait until your child is 17. Buy both volumes 1 and 2. Volume 2 covers Communication Skills, Problem Solving, Sex, Drugs, and Alcohol, School Problems and more. The two books are an excellent resource for child counselors and family therapists.
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Summary: Well-described package of behavioral techniques
Review: The subtitle of this book, "The Basics", is very appropriate, as it provides a very detailed and well-organized description of the basics of a behavior modification approach to improving a parent's parenting skills and addressing conflicts between parents and their adolescent children. It isn't a panacea and, unlike some parenting books, it does not claim to be one.The first part of the book is more global and describes the way the authors see parenting and familial interactions, with the problems seen in many homes and their theory as to how many of those problems arise. Then, they get into the specifics of monitoring behavior, picking target behaviors for modification, charting, point systems, and effective but non-hostile consequences. I am a child psychologist working in a clinic that specializes in working with low-income families with children who exhibit severe psychopathology. The approach described in this book would work best with children who could be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder, and similar diagnoses, plus it might work well, with modifications, if used with children showing symptoms in the Asperger's-autism spectrum. I think the purely behavioral approach described here would run into problems if it were applied to children with diagnoses involving significant clinical depression, high levels of anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and thought disorder. Overall, this is a good parenting book for parents whose children have behavioral problems, especially if the parents themselves are not experiencing significant emotional problems.
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