I tried to give this book some lenience because I realised that it did not fit with my parenting style, but it is logically inconsistenet, and pitched in a way that reflects a basic lack of respect for both parents and children.

Laughton King is glibly pitching what I would refer to as expedient parenting (I'm more about responsive parenting); he seems to be all about the quick fix. He is a proponent of encouraging children to follow their curiosity to their own detriment, rather than forbidding them from doing things that could harm them, so that they realise their own folly. This to me undermines the role of a parent as a guide and undermines the parent-child trust relationship. He seems not to believe that dialogue with a child or respect for the child's opinions are important to self efficacy and seems to see no importance in a child developing an internal locus of control (which I see as important to becoming a thoughtful member of society). This is so silly for someone with a background as a psychologist!

Laughton King clearly sees the child-parent dynamic as an adversarial one, and believes that to counter the direct resistence that authoritarian parents meet, parents need to employ clever coersion and sneaky strategies. He warns parents against lying to children and then suggests specific lies and deceptionsd that they can incorporate in their parenting methods. He warns against labelling children and then does so himself in his pitch, using scare tactics against permissiveness implying that parents who don't use his methods do not create enough structure in a child's life to avoid "creating little monsters".

I might give his basically disrespectful rhetoric a chance if I felt it was at all effective as parenting stretegy, but I think it undermines children's development or causes the breakdown of the parent-child relationship.

Most of the "good stuff" in this book I have read eleswhere, and useful stategies employed in this book are not worth the time invested to ferret them out. ( )