Every year, parents spend billions of dollars on child-rearing guidebooks, specialty magazines, and consultation with mental health professionals to address their children’s disruptive behavior. Yet the commonplace solutions that are provided often fail to produce any long-term behavioral improvement for the most difficult children. In his new book, Don’t Swear with Your Mouth Full!: When conventional discipline fails unconventional children, Dr. Chugh explains exactly where the field of Psychology got it wrong and offers simple-to-use, yet highly effective, strategies that parents, teachers, and therapists can use to eliminate even the toughest of behaviors kids throw their way.
Time-based discipline strategies, such as grounding for a week, sitting in time-out for 1 to 2 minutes for each year of life, taking a toy away for the day, detention after school, and sticker charts are technically flawed and do not work for the kids who need discipline the most. In fact, for certain kids, these strategies may actually promote worse behavior over time. Dr. Chugh offers a simple solution that is based on basic behavioral science. The defining feature of this book is the outline of a new approach for working with the most difficult of children referred to as behavior-limited discipline. Based on a new understanding of “operant conditioning principles”, behavior-limited discipline strategies close the loopholes present in conventional techniques, something that most people don’t notice exist until they work with the more stubborn and resistant the children.
The primary benefits of behavior-limited discipline include the following:
- Parents and teachers are removed from power struggles when correcting behavior.
- Kids are motivated to behave even when there is no adult present.
- Parents and teachers learn to maximize their leverage.
- Kids learn to care about making good choices more than the adults do.
- Parents and teachers don’t have to be overly negative to eliminate undesired behaviors.
- Kids need less discipline over time as self-control increases with these techniques.
Don’t Swear with Your Mouth Full! was designed to approximate the typical progression of material that Dr. Chugh covers in his practice with his clients. The book is user-friendly in that it uses plain language, provides numerous analogies to maximize the reader’s understanding of key concepts, and offers many concrete examples of the most typical behavior problems parents face to ensure these principles and ideas can be readily incorporated into parents’ lives.
Advanced Praise for Don’t Swear with Your Mouth Full!
Dr. Chugh’s methods can help even the most challenging of children to reach their full potential without forcing them to change their basic nature. A master of logic and wit, Dr. Chugh puts conventional parenting under the microscope in Don’t Swear and explains how to use your child’s most difficult traits effectively when trying to help with the socialization process. If you are raising or working with a child who is headstrong, controlling, or manipulative then you need to read this book!”
– Ruth A. Peters, Ph.D., author of Don’t Be Afraid to Discipline.
If you have a difficult, oppositional, or just plain ornery child, and no discipline system has seemed to work, it’s time to give this book a try. Dr. Chugh’s innovative approach is straightforward, easy to use, and fair. Surprisingly, this new method makes parenting easier by giving headstrong youngsters more of what of they crave – control over their own fates.”
– Thomas W. Phelan, Ph.D., author of 1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12
Enjoy the following selected illustrations from Don’t Swear with Your Mouth Full!: When conventional discipline fails unconventional children:
