Matthew Sanders 'Every Parent' parenting book

[becstarlitsea]

Does anyone else use this? I wondered if I could find someone to enthuse with. I bought it because a child psychiatrist I know said that she worked with him briefly and he really knew his stuff. It's amazing. DS is an angel now, I'm enjoying him so much. Lots of it is stuff that I'd tried anyway (sticker chart, positive parenting, time out etc) but it was the specifics of exactly how to do it that I was sometimes doing differently to how Matthew Sanders recommends and my god, the change in DS is just fantastic. So does anyone else use it?

no, but sounds good. It is the specifics of how to do things like timeouts, sticker charts etc, that make all the difference

Definitely. And we'd tried other books and it was just depressing because on the specifics they'd say 'Some parents worry that their child will do XYZ as a reaction to this parenting strategy, but in fact no child in my experience has done that'. Then DS would do XYZ and I'd think 'well, where does that leave us then?' I remember 'Toddler Taming' - reading Christopher Green's assertion that I should easily be able to outrun my son unless there was something wrong with me. Well, there was something wrong with me, I was recovering from meningitis at the time, and DS is bloody fast. Being told that there was clearly something wrong with me didn't actually help with the problem at all, it just made me miserable.

Matthew Sanders is amazing, I am so evangelical about this book.

I remember reading a book about tantrums, and in the introductory pages the author said none of her 4 kids had had tantrums!. Not v. comforting for me at the time (dealing with DS1s mental twice-a-day extravaganzas

Exactly! Seems to me like most of the parenting so-called gurus don't even have kids of their own, and if they do they don't necessarily have experience of real-life problems! The person who recommended it to me said that MS did masses of controlled studies to check every single strategy before it went in the book. So it's all evidence-based rather than 'I've got a TV series to plug' based. Compared to the glossier, better known books it seems a bit dry initially - no pictures or little bullet-point side bars. But by god it works and I'm so beside myself to have such a friendly happy little boy after months and months of deteriorating behaviour.