How to Talk When Kids Won't Listen: Whining, Fighting, Meltdowns, Defiance, and Other Challenges of Childhood (The How To Talk Series)

this book is super handy for very specific scenarios. it takes you through simple situations that you have likely experienced at home and provides step by step instructions how to approach them. at the end of each chapter is a short guide list that is very helpful to reference!

I read the authors first book about how fro so kids will listen! This book was helpful for me as we recently adopted two children and they needed special attention. One of the most helpful things we started implementing is the name calling strategy which showed us a different way to approach parenting with lots of helpful visual guides and examples

Great book with many helpful examples. I love the situational breakdowns ... they make this book very useful as a quick reference guide in the future. In the heat of the moment, I think we, as parents, sometimes forget how to best respond to our kids, but the content of this book provides much inspiration for how to do better.

I first heard of the How to Talk series when I was in grad school for speech therapy, and I've been devoted to it ever since! I specifically love this book and go back to it often, both for my own family and for the families I work with in early intervention! It is practical, helpful, and gives solid concrete guidelines to help your family function as best it can with young children. Following these guidelines has allowed me to sustain connection with my daughter with ADHD, even through trying pre-teen times.

Great parenting advice, especially for those tense times when your kids are driving you nuts. Practicing some of the recommendations presented in this book and they work.

How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen, Listen so Little Kids Will Talk is one of my favorite parenting books. I recommend it to all my friends and family who have kids. When I saw Joanna and Julie had a new book coming out, I knew that I would read it. Especially when I have a child, who despite using the techniques in their first book, does not listen often.The first part of the book is a small recap or reminder of the important topics discussed in their first book. Acknowledging feelings, engaging cooperation, offering choices, problem solving, praise etc etc etc. The second part of the book provides more examples of how to put these techniques into practice. To be honest, it was more or less an extension of their last book. Only there are more examples of how to apply these skills in your parenting. The examples are more specific and therefore more helpful. I found it useful because if a parent is having an issue with a particular battle, like sharing or homework then can flip to that specific chapter for tips.I love the writing style of these two authors. It has great flow and they provide plenty of examples of how to put this into practice and when/how it worked for others. Each section ends with a recap which is helpful. The writing isn't dry or hard to follow which can be common in other parenting books. The way the book is formatted makes it easy to skip the sections that don't apply to you at the time.I won't lie, while I enjoyed reading this book, I kept saying in my head "but what about a kid like mine? A kid who really doesn't respond well when I acknowledge his feelings which doesn't allow me to put the other skills into practice" and then they had a whole section for me which was titled "Troubleshooting" There was some good ideas that I could try to put into practice in the future with my challenging child.Overall, I really enjoyed this book and the authors get another 5 stars from me. I feel like this book is coming out at the perfect time. After being home with my kids for the last 16 months because of COVID, I realized that I had defaulted away from acknowledging feelings and engaging cooperation. I slipped back into some of the ways I used to parent before reading their first book. This book kind of gave me a bit of a reboot which I am grateful for. It was a refreshing read and makes me feel rejuvenated when it comes to parenting some of the challenging behaviors .

Joanna Faber and Julie King have a hard row to hoe. Their subject matter - the challenges of childhood - has been covered and covered well, many times over. When I received a copy of How To Talk When Kids Won’t Listen, the odds of it being worth reviewing seemed close to zero. But they nailed it. Part one includes tools for dealing with feelings (such as “simply listen with oh’s, ugh’s, mmm’s, and ah’s”), strategies for getting kids to cooperate, a problem-solving process to replace punishment, and ways to inspire without corrosive praise. What’s special isn’t the content. It’s that they present the basics of research-backed child wrangling skillfully, with comics that help break up the data dump (which, yay, feature drawings with different ethnicities and abilities), end-of-chapter summaries that are easy to post on a wall, and prose that’s relatable, practical, and even anticipates common objections (e.g., “Not every situation calls for acknowledging feelings! … “‘Mom, what does e-n-o-u-g-h spell?’ You don’t need to respond, ‘Sounds like you’re feeling frustrated and unsure of how to pronounce that strange and confusing collection of letters.’ You can simply say ‘enough.’”)Faber and King relate to parents who make a muddle of things, writing, for example, “Our intention is to be soothing…. It will be OKAY! But the message they hear is a different one: ‘You can’t have what you want and I don’t care, because your feelings are not important enough to bother about.’” At the same time, the authors successfully put the adult reader inside a child’s head: “How would you feel if your husband …” they often ask.Part two is a little bit exemplar and a little bit additional justification, using real-life scenarios from letters, emails, and workshop conversations to demonstrate how the tools of part one can be applied in specific situations. You could skip it, but then you’d miss gems like, “When kids complain over nothing, just to get attention, we can just give them attention, because that’s what they need” and “If your child continues to whine, we give you permission to tell them ‘I can’t listen anymore,’ and leave the room!” Highly recommend as a primer for parents of young kids and a reminder for the more seasoned among us looking to better connect with tweens and teens.

Very helpful and practical book - the example cartoons help especially