Praise for When the Parents Change:
‘Brilliant’ – Kate Silverton, author of There’s No Such Thing as Naughty
‘An absolute game-changer’ – Sarah Turner, aka The Unmumsy Mum
‘Singularly powerful’ – Tina Payne Bryson, author of The Whole-Brain Child
The culture of any home is determined by the parents. And that’s because your behaviour the only behaviour over which you have absolute control. To change your children’s behaviour, you first need to change your own.
If you can remain unflappably calm in the face of every supermarket tantrum and sarcastic eye-roll, order will soon follow. Britain’s leading children’s behaviour expert believes every parent can turn even the most chaotic of homes into an oasis of calm, starting today.
In his new book When the Parents Change: Seismic Shifts in Children’s Behaviour, Paul reveals how parents really can maintain a sense of Zen-like serenity in the face of even the unruliest behaviour, from school-gate screaming matches to mealtime childmageddon. The book offers a set of simple strategies for coolly getting the behaviour you want – without shouting instructions, doling out deranged punishments or a single cold, hard cash-bribe in sight – including:
- How to practice ‘positive noticing’ to get more of the behaviour you want
- What counter-intuitive parenting is (i.e. resisting the urge to respond to poor behaviour with emotion and impulse) and how it will help you become an ‘emotionally-regulated’ adult
- Sticky Praise: an alternative way to use praise for better behaviour (because your sticker-charts aren’t working!)
- How to be strict while being kind: setting three simple rules for more consistent parenting
And more! Based on three decades working in some of the countries toughest schools, Paul’s approach was first applied in the classroom in his book for teachers, When the Adults Change, Everything Changes – still the biggest-selling children’s behaviour book of the 21st century.
The tried-and-tested methods in When the Parents Change will change what your child does by first changing what you do. You will never need to raise your voice again.
When the Parents Change, Everything Changes: Seismic Shifts in Children’s Behaviour by Paul Dix (paperback) is published by Penguin, RRP £10.99 – out now and available online and in bookshops
About the author
After countless attempts to sabotage his own education, Paul Dix miraculously went on to train at Homerton College, Cambridge, before going on to work as a teacher at some of Britain’s most challenging urban schools.
Over the next three decades, Paul would develop a unique approach to behaviour change – one rooted in the calm consistency of the adults. After outlining his method in the bestselling When the Adults Change, Everything Changes, it became a word-of-mouth phenomenon among teachers and has now been drawn upon in over 150,000 classrooms worldwide. His second book for teachers After the Adults Change, goes further, explaining how teachers and school leaders can move beyond the behaviour management revolution and develop a whole-school ethos rooted in kindness, empathy and understanding, where expectations and boundaries are exemplified by calm, consistent and regulated adults.
When, in 2002, Paul became a dad, he began to wonder whether his behaviour change method might just work for parents too. Now, for the first time, Paul introduces his findings to the most important audience of all: parents.
