Essential advice from the author of the bestsellingGet Out Of My Life Today's children--from toddlers to preteens--challenge their parents in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, notes Anthony E. Wolf, and parents are often uncertain about how to cope. In his new book, Wolf presents a fresh perspective on this less pleasant behavior and a surprisingly simple method for dealing with it. He argues that punishments and rewards don't work and may even be counterproductive. Instead, parents must act swiftly and decisively following Wolf's easy but powerful technique. Using numerous examples of effective and ineffective parent-child interactions, he offers practical advice on a wide range of basic issues, from tantrums and back talk, to getting kids off to school in the morning and eliminating sibling fights. Humorous and easy to use,The Secret of Parentingis guaranteed to dramatically increase the joy parents get from raising their children.

Anthony E. Wolf, Ph.D., is a practicing clinical psychologist. He has worked with children and adolescents for thirty years and lectures frequently on parenting topics. He lives in Suffield, Connecticut.

"Dr. Wolf has the best ear of anyone listening to kids today."--Pamela Abrams, editor in chief of Child, on Why did you have to get a divorce?

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Chapter One

Baby-Self Basics

Seven-year-old Steven comes home from school. He opens the door, takes off his coat, and, not a foot away from a coat hook that conveniently sits on the wall directly next to the door, drops his coat on the floor.

"Steven, how many times do I have to tell you to hang up your coat?" says his mother exasperatedly as she enters the room to greet him.

"I don't know. A lot?" mumbles Steven as he then, with great effort, hangs up his coat.

The next day when Steven comes home from school, he enters the house and immediately takes off his coat. On this particular day, his mother, who only the day before had yelled at him for not hanging up his coat, happens to be standing right by the door.

"Hi, Mom," says a happy Steven as he simultaneously drops his coat on the floor.

How many times will Steven's mother have to tell him to hang up his coat before he learns? Many. Since he's now in second grade, a rough calculation of years left in school times the number of days a year he will come home and drop his coat on the floor comes to ten times about two hundred, which is many, many times.

However, the rest of this story has an odd twist. Steven has a cubby at school and in that cubby is a coat hook. Every day, without anybody saying anything to him, Steven neatly hangs his coat on the coat hook in his cubby. Not all second graders regularly hang up their coats in school, but many who never hang up their coats at home do it at school without a second thought.

I use this story because it's a simple example of a phenomenon that is true of all children, all adults, everybody. Each of us has two separate and distinct modes of operating -- in essence two separate selves.

One of them is mostly an at-home self and I call it the baby self . This self and how it acts is defined by two overlapping and overwhelming characteristics: the baby self must be fed and fed now , and it has zero tolerance for any form of stress. The baby self feeds itself by indulging, collapsing, relaxing, unwinding -- soaking up all the good stuff. A perfect meal for the baby self would consist of lounging on the couch, eating Doritos, with headphones blocking out any unwanted interruption. The baby self gets stressed when it has to do something that it doesn't feel like doing at any given moment. Being asked to take out the trash while it's lounging on the couch would qualify as major stress. This zero tolerance is often the part of the baby self that parents understand the least, and it's also the part that causes the most trouble. Baby selves can be nice and lovable, but when they're asked to tolerate any form of stress, they can get very cranky and crabby.

The other mode, which I call the mature self , exists mainly in the world outside the home. Unlike its baby-self counterpart, the mature self is willing to work, will tolerate stress, has patience, has self-control, and can and is willing to delay gratification. It will work toward a goal. Steven's mature self hangs up his coat at school.

These separate modes come and go during the course of a day, very much like the changing of gears. You can actually feel the switch. Take me, after a hard day at the office. Let's say I've come home from a very stressful day during which I was able to hold it together completely. Throughout the day, I was patient, mature, and professional -- at all times. When I arrive home, even as I open the front door, I can feel the energy draining out of my body. I stagger into the house, stumble forward, barely able to make it to the couch, where I collapse, hardly able to move or talk. If I'm lucky, the remote control for the TV is within arm's length. If it is not, I may need assistance.

Couples know this phenomenon. Perhaps one family member has been home for the whole day and has not talked to another adult during that time. When his or her partner, who maybe has talked to too many adults during the day, arrives home, he or she is not as eager to launch immediately into a conversation as the one who has been isolated at home all day.

"You would not believe what happened with the man who was supposed to come and fix the refrigerator leak ..."

But the partner, now fully in baby-self mode, does not want to hear about it. Listening requires patience and patience is just another form of stress. What many couples, in fact, learn to do is to give the one just coming home a certain amount of down time, in effect giving that person's baby self some time before initiating a conversation with the mature self.

" Now tell me about your day."

All baby selves are the same, with no variation from person to person over the course of a lifetime. The mature self grows, gradually taking over more of the day-to-day functioning, ultimately coming to control the where and when of our baby selves. But baby selves never change.

We All Need Our Baby Selves

When my children were little, I loved them very much, of course, but I also remember how I loved them best of all when they were asleep. They were so cute. Anyone who has young children knows that moment when they are finally in bed and asleep. At last it is your time -- your own baby-self time. At last you can do what you feel like doing. Understandably, when you at last have a chance to be by yourself and relax, you consider it an intrusion when a small pajamaed figure quietly shuffles into the room.

"Can Grandma Edith who died see me in my room?"

"No. Go to bed."

"But I can hear her breathing."

"You can't hear her breathing. GO TO BED."

"You come with me."

"GO TO BED."

A striking example of children's need for enough baby-self time can be seen in a well-known phenomenon with foster children. Many of these children join a new family and are quite well-behaved for the first month or two. But then, for no apparent reason, they start acting badly. The "honeymoon period" ends and the true test of the foster placement begins. Will the foster parents hang in there with the children who are going to give them trouble, or, as often happens, will they call the agency and request that the children be placed with another family?

The well-behaved foster children who suddenly turn unruly are a common occurrence, but from one perspective it doesn't make sense, because the laws of psychology say that if a behavior is rewarded it will continue. If the children were behaving well and, as a result, were getting a lot of positive feedback from their foster parents, why wouldn't they continue to be good? The answer is that the mature self may have been getting lots of positive feedback for being good, but the baby self was starving. Being on good behavior meant operating in the mature mode. This is very much like being a guest in the home. That kind of behavior, especially if you are a child, can only be sustained for so long. Eventually the needs of the baby self take over.

It is in the baby-self mode and only the baby-self mode that we, our children -- all of us -- receive our basic, deep nurturing. I liken this nurturing of the baby self to a boxer who comes back to his corner between rounds, collapses on his stool, gets replenished, which sustenance then allows him to go back into the ring. With children, this deep nurturing feeds the core of the personality, and it is upon this deep nurturing that all else is built. It is the base that allows them to grow and mature and ultimately go out and deal with the world.

When we adults have to do without our baby selves, the stress of everyday life becomes just too much and we cannot cope. We all need a place for our baby selves. But our children, because they are still so young, need it even more.

Who Gets the Baby Self?

An absolute fact of human psychology is that the mere physical presence of a parent brings out the baby self in a child. It's not a conscious decision on the part of a child. It simply happens. If you want to see the classic example of this, take a story all parents know.

Valerie had been over at a friend's house. As soon as her mother arrives to take her home, Valerie starts up.

"Can we go to McDonald's before we go home?"

"No, dear, I'm sorry. I told you we're not going to have time."

"But why, why can't we go?"

"I already told you. There's not enough time."

"But why? You promised. You never do anything I want. Why?"

"Valerie, I didn't promise anything."

"Yes, you did. You did, You're a liar. You promised. You promised!"

Watching this scene unfold, the other child's parent looks on with surprise.

"I don't understand. Valerie was so well-behaved until you showed up. She and Alexa were playing really well together."

Both parents then incorrectly conclude:

"Oh, she must be tired."

Wrong. Had Valerie's mother showed up an hour earlier or an hour later, the same thing would have happened.

Another example:

Have your child or children go to a restaurant with another couple. Videotape the scene. Then take your kids with you to that same restaurant. Videotape this scene. You will then have matched recordings of the mature- and baby-self behavior of your children. And what happens if you and the other couple together accompany your kids to the restaurant? The baby self usually wins.

"Oh, we've never seen this side of your kids before."

Even years later, when adults visit their own parents, maddeningly the baby-self side still comes out.

"I don't understand it. As an adult I've learned to deal with so many difficult people, but when mother starts up, I go crazy."

More accurately, it is not strictly a parent who brings out the baby self in a child. Anyone with whom a child has a strong love attachment, who is involved in regular day-to-day child care, and with whom a child feels totally safe and comfortable, will bring out the baby self. Hence with grandparents from a distant city whom the children see at most a couple times a year, only the mature self makes an appearance. But grandparents who regularly participate in day-to-day child care will see much of the baby self.

The same distinction can even apply with the parents themselves. If both are involved in regular day-to-day child care, both will get the baby self. But if one parent does much of the day-to-day child care and one does little, one gets the baby self, the other the mature self. And there's no question who gets which.

"Luke, stop playing with the lamp switch," says his

mother to her seven-year-old son.

"I'm not hurting anything. I'm just experimenting."

"Luke, stop playing with the lamp switch."

"I'm not doing anything. Why do you always yell at me

about stuff?"

"I don't always yell at you."

"Yes, you do. You yell at me about everything."

Meanwhile, Luke's father, who is in the next room reading his newspaper, is disturbed again by the yelling between his wife and son. Disgustedly, he gets up from his chair, goes into the next room, and says:

"Luke, stop playing with the lamp switch."

Whereupon Luke immediately stops. At that point Luke's father turns to his wife and says something that has probably caused a number of divorces:

"Claire, you just aren't tough enough with the kids."

I'll show you what's tough , thinks Luke's mother as she considers reaching for the lamp and throwing it at her husband. And she's right about the injustice of the accusation. Luke's very different responses with his two parents have nothing to do with toughness, and everything to do with the simple fact that his mother gets Luke's baby-self version and his father the mature-self version.

Who gets the baby self has nothing to do with the sex of the parent. I have known families where the mother worked out of the house and most of the day-to-day child care was handled by the father. In those families, the father got the baby self, the mother the mature self.

(Continues...)