Rules, Rituals and Routines: A Values Based Approach to Managing Behaviors at Home; Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

Dr. Thomas Knestrict, a professor of early childhood education at Xavier University with a consultation business on the side, is the presenter for Rules, Rituals and Routines, a talking-head lecture outlining what Knestrict considers to be the three keys to managing children: adopting basic household rules, sharing in family rituals, and following regular routines in the home. Because he is an education school professor, there are the expected references here to the ideas of B.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky, the modern trinity of educational psychologists, though he says that parents should be wary of anyone claiming to be an “expert” in child rearing. Interestingly, for years my family has been doing all of the things Knestrict suggests—with uneven results—so parents' success with rules, rituals, and routines may (as they say about mileage) vary. In Unconditional Parenting, another talking-head lecture, Alfie Kohn claims that “the word ‘good'—theoretically—can mean honorable or ethical or compassionate, but…where children are concerned, it's more likely to mean, ‘Not a pain in the butt to me.' Good means well-behaved, good means quiet where children are concerned, and [that's why so many books and articles focus] on getting kids to do whatever it is we demand, which often has to do with their simply being compliant.” Kohn calls timeouts “forcible isolation of small children” and argues that they show “conditional affection,” but only after 90 minutes of lecturing does he eventually get around to mentioning his 10 parenting principals (not listed onscreen): reconsider requests, put the relationship first, love unconditionally, be authentic, apologize, talk less/ask more, attribute the best motives to children, try to say yes, don't be rigid, and let kids decide when possible. Sounds reasonable on paper, but this morning I found that accommodating my four-year-old son's desires while not trampling on his baby brother's right to exist led to several conflicts before 7:00 a.m. Neither of these talk-fests really present a convincing grand unified theory of parenting, but both have their pluses and minuses and should be considered strong optional purchases for larger parenting collections. Aud: P. (R. Reagan)