Hacker News Books

"How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen, and How to Listen So Your Kids Will Talk" is also good.

"Parenting From The Inside Out" is a gut punch about getting your own psychological problems addressed first.

I'll also say that prioritizing sleep (as best as you can), proper diet, exercise, and healthy boundaries between work/home are sometimes so much more important than any book you could be reading.

No lying at all. You're just taking a concrete rule and setting soft and hard boundaries. Expect testing of the soft boundaries. But set them so that hard boundaries aren't reached.

For instance you have a set of stairs and an exploratory 3 year old. Successfully getting on to area around the top of the stairs gets the kid told to come back. If the kid doesn't come back right away, the kid gets picked up and carried away. If the kid tries to go to the stairs, the kid gets a time-out.

With these rules, you can expect to see exploration of how far over the line the toe can go before being told to come back. Expect fetching to become a game. But your kid won't actually go down the stairs. (Of course in this simple case a gate makes more sense.)

>Just training kids with operant conditioning is not sufficient to be a decent parent.

I assume you mean parent in the limited sense of social educator else this is something of a truism; could you expand on this?

I'm going to suggest the book Parenting From The Inside-Out for an exploration of the ways in which our interactions with our children shape their ability to integrate their emotional and logical responses of the world into a useful, coherent, whole.