The Everyday Parenting Toolkit: The Kazdin Method for Easy, Step-by-Step, Lasting Change for You and Your Child

This is a great parenting book that focuses on encouragement more than punishment. It teaches parents to anticipate behavior before it occurs and help to set the scene for better behavior.Alan E. Kazdin teaches parents to use a calm voice rather than using anger or demands to get a children to do what is asked of them. It teaches parents to praise the behavior that you want to see when you see it and to start with the basics of the behavior that you want to see and build on it over time. If you want your child to take a shower without complaining or refusing to take one, you should anticipate this behavior before asking them to take a shower. Use a system that motivates your child such as a sticker/point system to earn extra tv time, picking dinner for the night, downloading a game, playing a board game, etc. He teaches parents to give their children more choices that will make them want to do what is asked of them, rather than being demanding. It will take a little more effort to get the behavior that you want to see more of in your child, but highly worth the time and effort. I highly recommend this book to anyone raising children. It has helped me to get my boys to stop fighting as much and has helped me to get my daughter to help around the house without as many prompts!!

This book provides an excellent summary of the so-called "The Kazdin Method" which is also extensively described in another book written by Dr. Kazdin and entitled "The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child: With No Pills, No Therapy, No Contests of Wills." Dr. Kazdin is among the most influential mental health scholars in the world, and in this book he again found a way to translate the complexity of the mental health literature with emphasis on children and adolescents into a language parents can understand. This explains why I strongly recommend "The Everyday Parenting Toolkit" in my forthcoming book entitled "Informed Parents, Healthy Kids: Information You Need to Know to Find the Right Mental Health Practitioner." If parents want to find answers to important mental health questions with an emphasis on an evidence-based approach (e.g., What do you want your child to do? "How do you get the behavior going?" "What can you do to get the final behaviors you want?" "What positive consequences wil you use to follow the behavior?", etc.) then you should read Dr. Kazdin's "Toolkit" to find the correct answers to such questions.

Loved this book and the practical methods, the wonderful explanations that are easy to follow and the encouragement Dr. Kazdin gives. It is easy to understand and worth your time. You will see changes in your child, yourself and the atmosphere in your home when you implement the ideas. I got this for my daughter but read it first...and I'm using it with my 5 yr old granddaughter and with my daughter who happens to be in her mid-40s! (Never too late!) Wish I had had it when she was little...we tend to parent the way we were parented and in my case, that wasn't very well. Great book!

I use methods from Kazdin's previous book with great success. His previous book was for the defiant child according to the title, but many of the reviews here say it's the best method for parenting any child. Finally, he has written a book explicitly targeted to parenting any child.There are few parenting book like this one. Most books are fill with opinions. This book is based techniques from a large body of knowledge and methods confirmed by scientific research.You will not believe how good it feels solve parenting problems quickly with little effort, after you have switched from hit or miss (or even counterproductive) opinion-based methods to methods have been known to work for years or even up to five decades. We just past the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the extraordinary effectiveness some of these tools by scientists, so it's about time that all parents learned to use them and learned to them right.

Great book filled with many amazing parenting tips/tools. I was assigned to read this for a psychology class but have been recommending this to many of my "mom friends". I have began implementing some tools with my child and have seen that they really do work. I would recommend this book to ALL parents, even if you aren't exactly struggling with a difficult child, this has many great tips for children of all ages as well. You can't go wrong with this purchase. The author explains the steps very well so that you can be confident in using them with your child.

Helpful, compassionate about real parenting challenges. Parents need to be planful. It’s not an instinct. Use this approach with care and consistency. Kazdin’s focus on reinforcement and arranging situations to increase the likelihood of you child’s success is really important. Punishment is generally a bad idea that fouls the parent-child relationship.

I am a pediatric psychologist and a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. I highly recommend this book for parents! It is chock-full of information pulled straight from the scientific evidence we have about how and why children misbehave and includes a ton of preventative strategies. Kazdin also excels at communicating sometimes complex topics in easy-to-read and even humorous ways.

There's nothing I really didn't like about this book. It is full of practical ideas. I liked Kazdin's advice not to ground a child or have some negative consequence for a long time period.

This book is an excellent resource for parents of children of all ages, not just young ones. And it provides some good guidelines on how to elicit desired responses from adults too. I highly recommend it. Simple, practical and effective.

Excellent book. Every parent needs to have this book.I have a six and seven year old and I have appreciated many of the suggestions. Also great for parents of younger children as well.

Great

Not what I was expecting. Yet another self-help book with way too many pages for what is ultimately rather simple, common-sense approaches to rearing children. It could be a shorter book, more to the point, with less examples of frankly extreme cases of cluelessness thus giving me more time to read a book I'd actually find interesting.

Takes a while to get your head around. Very different from all other parenting techniques but makes parenting feel much better and more controlled. Worked on my three year old almost immediately and sorted out lots of issues I was concerned with - diet,shyness with others, sharing toys with friends and bedtime routine.