Because you have picked up this book, chances are you have experienced moments when you have been totally exasperated, frustrated, and exhausted by your child’s behavior. You have lived through meltdowns and fl ailing legs as you try to put on your child’s shoes; you’ve fought battles every day over the smallest things, and heard the word “no” more than you would care to imagine.

You may be the parent of an anxious child who is crying and stuck to your leg, refusing to go into the birthday party with all the other happy, enthusiastic kids. Maybe you are the one whose child is rambunctious and aggressive and who feels the judgmental glances of other parents dropping off or picking up their kids at school. Maybe your child is usually pretty good, but when he’s bad he takes everyone down with him. There are many parents who feel the way you do. All parents feel that way from time to time, and all children can be challenging at times, but some children are different. The sensible consequences and strategies that sound great and work with other children—even your own other children—don’t always work on them. If any of the above sounds familiar to you, you already know you are the parent of a challenging child—or a gladiator child, as I affectionately call such children.

Children’s behavior can be challenging for many reasons. Most often it’s as simple as temperament and personality; sometimes it’s caused by family issues and stressors; sometimes it’s caused by anxiety; and at times there is an underlying issue such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Whatever the reason, like all children, challenging children have many wonderful traits. They can be funny, smart, loving, energetic, and sensitive. They can, however, also be intense, defiant, and hard on their siblings. They can fixate on the smallest things and excel at wearing you down. They can get wound up and overexcited and have a hard time calming themselves. They can argue like the best of lawyers, ruin great moments, and embarrass you in public. They can make you sadder and angrier than you ever thought possible, and cause you to question every parenting decision you make. You love them with all your heart, but at times you can’t stand to be around them. Maybe you question yourself, have terrible guilt, fear for your child, and wonder why no one else seems to have a child quite like yours. Parenting can be extremely difficult, as well as extremely rewarding, but parenting a challenging child is a job that truly requires support, guidance, and a really good plan.

This book is but one in a sea of parenting books, each promising to make parenting easier. There are many great parenting books with great insights and strategies to offer; all of them have something important to say. So what on earth could be different about this one? This book will offer you a unique and powerful perspective. These pages are filled with a host of specific strategies that I suspect will be different from others you have tried and that work with all children. If your child is not particularly challenging, these strategies will work like a dream, helping you and your child stay close as they help your child develop confidence and a strong sense of self. And if your child is a gladiator, this book becomes even more crucial because it will provide you with new and incredibly effective ways to build or rebuild loving bonds, and help him or her develop better emotional regulation, impulse control, social health, and resilience.

What makes this program so different is the fact that the Connected Parenting method is primarily based on therapy techniques, not parenting techniques. It helps you to bond with and soothe your kids, as well as to model compassion, empathy, responsibility, and a commitment to deep understanding. It gives you a way to effectively contain—that is, to set boundaries—and to guide and correct behavior that comes from a place of love rather than from anger or frustration. By doing that, it brings out the best in both you and your child. Following the program won’t be easy—nothing worthwhile ever is. But in the end, your child will be more compliant, more relaxed, and—most important—happier, and you will feel proud of your parenting and closer to your child.

More often than not, when the phone rings in my office, the person on the other end is the frightened or desperate parent of a child who may be very much like yours. These parents describe their children as anxious or defiant or emotionally volatile or as little warriors with whom they engage in endless battles. They are likely to tell me that although they love their child, at times they also hate him. They say that this is not what they signed up for, not what they thought their child would be, and not how they had pictured themselves as parents. They may describe their home as a war zone or themselves as tiptoeing around, trying to avoid the next skirmish. They confess that they don’t know how they’re going to get through the next ten or fifteen minutes with their child, let alone the next fifteen years, and, most often, they feel terribly guilty not only about their feelings but also because they think they may be the cause of the problem.

Again and again these beleaguered moms and dads promise themselves that they’re not going to yell anymore, that they will be more patient, that they will no longer say things they really don’t mean, such as, “If you can’t behave I’m going to have to give you away.” And then, two or three days later, their child will do something that makes them crazy and they’ll just snap and say or do the same thing all over again. On a good day, they love their child so much that it hurts and desperately want her to be happy and understood by others. On a bad day, they want to be anywhere but near this child and can feel resentful, hurt, and angry at the toll his behavior takes on them and everyone else in the family. Most of all, these parents are overwhelmed by how much time their challenging child demands, often at the expense of other children in the family.

If you share these feelings, I want to assure you, as I do them, that it’s not your fault. Most of us could not do any better, and those who have relaxed, easygoing children have no idea what it takes to keep your patience day after day and love a child who is sometimes so hard to love. It can be heartbreaking and tremendously stressful, not only for the child and his or her parents, but also for siblings and extended family. What develops in these situations is a dynamic between you and your child that brings out the worst in each of you—but you do have the power to create amazing change.

Most of the children I work with have more than the average share of emotional problems, and they may or may not also have an underlying condition that exacerbates their behavior. The extreme satisfaction I get from my job is that I can offer hope and a plan that will help all parents to strengthen and enhance the connection between them and their children and, at the same time, bring out the best in their children. I can help to bring the experience of parenting even the most challenging child in line with the best of what parenting holds.

Empathy is the most important part of being a parent; in truth, it is the most important part of being human. It is what connects us to one another, what holds relationships together, and what allows us to experience mutual respect and deep caring. We know that children respond well to empathy from birth, that it is critical for healthy development in general, and, in particular, for the development of a cohesive and organized sense of self. For that reason alone, empathy is an essential parenting tool, and while we do not always feel like being empathic, it is critical in many, many ways to our child’s happiness and success.

Understanding how to use empathy as the first step toward repairing frayed bonds and changing behavior will enhance and integrate all the techniques you already use and all the knowledge you have already derived from your own experience, from other parenting books, or from other resources you have accessed. It is a beautiful gift to your children and a lovely way to parent. The empathic method I teach takes commitment and a willingness to try whenever possible to be nondefensive, to choose your words carefully, and to stay confident and consistent in the face of negative behavior. The rewards it offers are many, and the results last a lifetime.

Many parenting books discuss how important it is to listen to your children and to be empathic. What many books don’t tell you, however, is how to be empathic and how to move beyond empathy to control and correct difficult or unacceptable behaviors. The whole point of connected parenting and the method I teach is to empathize not only so that your child will feel safe and understood, but also so that you, the parent, will be better able to correct and guide his or her behavior.

Many of us think we already know how to be empathic, but, as easy as it sounds, being empathic and listening well are very difficult skills, requiring practice, patience, thoughtfulness, and a nondefensive stance that is extremely difficult to maintain when you are hurt or angry. In addition, empathy, in and of itself, isn’t enough. We also need to know what to do next. Once we’ve empathized with a child’s anger, frustration, or anxiety, how do we go on to make him understand that the coping behaviors he is using are not acceptable and will not serve him well? In short, how do we get him to change?

This guide takes you that crucial extra step and provides you with a blueprint for creating positive change. The skills I teach sometimes seem counterintuitive, but you can acquire them, just as my clients do, with the help, support, and insight this book will provide. In the beginning you may just have to trust that what you’re doing will work, but when it does, it will be life-altering for both you and your child.

I am a social worker and a child and family therapist, and one of my major influences comes from a particular kind of therapy called selfpsychology, which is based on the premise that, as a therapist, you work very hard to be attuned to your client’s feelings and experiences and to be aware of your own agenda and intent. Over the years, I have developed a rather eclectic approach to therapy that combines compassion and deep caring with consistency and limit-setting. Learning these techniques has been exciting and challenging. It has taken a lot of practice, but my reward has been to see wonderful changes in both the children I work with and their parents. The tools I use and teach enhance closeness between parent and child, lower anxiety, reduce power struggles, and, most important, build resilience in the child, while at the same time bringing out the best in us as parents. My therapeutic model helps us to treat our children with compassion and dignity, and to support behavioral change from the inside out.

What is also important about this model is that it recognizes that we all make mistakes and offers ways to repair and “redo” when necessary. As a mother, I know how frustrating parenting can be and that we all lose our temper and blow it sometimes. Even though I teach connected parenting and believe in it fully, I still get angry and don’t always do what I know is right.

To illustrate the power of the forgiving nature of this model, I would like to share the story of Mollie, the client who first helped me to understand how important empathy is.

At ten years old, Mollie had already cultivated such a negative personality for herself that I found it extremely difficult just to be in the room and remain positive with her. I was green as grass and ready to save the world, I was ready to be caring and understanding and supportive to this client, but Mollie was more of a challenge than I could have anticipated.

She was the product of a rape, and because of the way she came into the world, her mother, Kate, had great difficulty loving her. In fact, Mollie used to throw herself down the stairs as a young child just to get some kind of affection from her mother. When I spoke with Kate, she told me that even in the hospital nursery Mollie had screamed and cried in order to wake the other babies, and that when she nursed, Mollie had bitten her on purpose. In other words, Mollie’s mother was projecting purposeful malevolence onto what was, in reality, normal infant behavior. It was clear to me that the child just couldn’t win, but that didn’t really help me when I was in her presence.

Because she’d been so consistently rejected from birth, Mollie seemed determined to keep people at arm’s length so that they would never get close enough for her to risk another rejection. Her unconscious thought process appeared to say: “If I try to get close to someone he or she will wind up hurting me, so I won’t give anyone any reason to do that.”

By the time I met her, this young girl was incredibly rude and offensive, and had the habit of picking on every little thing anyone did. I knew what was going on, and I tried my best to be professional and to not be affected by what she said, but after a few weeks it was becoming very difficult. Being with her was exhausting. She was pushing buttons I didn’t even know I had, commenting on every aspect of my appearance, every mispronounced word that came out of my mouth.

It made for a very long therapy hour, and at some point I went to my supervisor and said, “You know, I think I have a problem. I’m not sure I can do this. I don’t think I’m cut out to be a therapist after all. I find it difficult just to sit in the room with this child. What am I going to do?”

Her response was, “That tells you a great deal about this little girl. This is how everyone reacts to her. Imagine walking through life and having everybody feel about you the way you do—even your therapist can’t stand being in a room with you. You have to go back in there and tolerate that negativity. Don’t respond the way others do, and show ruthless compassion.” By that she meant that I had to do nothing but remain unfailingly compassionate no matter how Mollie responded. It was my introduction to self-psychology.

One of the ways I’d been coping with this difficult child was to be a few minutes late entering the room. It was only three or four minutes but, to be entirely honest, I really needed to gather myself up to face her, and wasting a few minutes seemed the only thing to do. So, I would walk in late to our session and Mollie would verbally attack me, saying I was stupid, I was the worst therapist in the world, and I should be fi red. I would then respond in what I thought was a very empathic, professional way, saying things like, “It must make you very angry when I come into the room late,” to which she would answer, “Of course I’m angry, you idiot.”

After I had spoken with my supervisor, and again walked into the room a minute or two late, Mollie, predictably, attacked me. This time, however, I was ready with a new attitude and a new response. In a very understanding voice with not an ounce of defensiveness I said, “You are absolutely right. This is your hour. It belongs to you. You’re never late. It’s your time and I chose to do something else with it. This isn’t the first time I’ve done that either.”

That was all I had a chance to say before tears welled up in her eyes and she said, “People always do that to me! They never care about what I want . . .” And there it was. For the first time in the four months I’d been working with her I saw a real little person in there who was suffering and hurting, and that was something I could connect with.

What I had done was to let Mollie know that I understood what she was feeling without defending and explaining myself. I had reflected her experience back to her without judgment. This is mirroring, a technique developed by Heinz Kohut, the father of self-psychology. My own version and interpretation of this technique is at the core of what I’ll be teaching you in this book. What I didn’t do—and this is extremely important—was to try to tell her what she was feeling or to “fix” those feelings. If I had said, “You must feel . . .” I would have broken the connection by letting her know that I was observing her and trying to figure her out. Instead I had responded, with words, expression, and body language, as if I were joining with her in the experience. I was letting her know that I felt her feelings without ever having to state them and, at the same time, I was letting her know that she had a right to those feelings. I continued to mirror, and week by week something wonderful happened. Mollie stopped insulting me, she asked for help, and she became more pleasant, even warm. It wasn’t long before I began to enjoy rather than dread our sessions. Within a couple of months others in the office also noticed the change in her, began to comment on this, and changed their own responses to her. It was a powerful therapeutic experience that would affect us both forever.

To this day I am grateful to that supervisor and to that child for teaching me about empathy. It was a lesson that has had a profound impact on me as a therapist, as a person, and, ultimately, as a mother. It made me understand on the deepest level that the most effective way to change behavior is through nondefensiveness and unfailing compassion.

Before you begin to practice connected parenting it is important to understand why it works and how it affects your behavior as a parent. What does it mean to take a nondefensive stance? What it means for me as a therapist is that I must never assume my actions have been understood the way I intended. As human beings we filter our experiences of one another through our own history of successes and failures. This is called intersubjectivity, which essentially means that reality generally lies somewhere in the middle of how a communication or action is intended and how it is perceived by each individual. Let’s say, for example, that I am in a session with a client who begins to tell a particularly intense story toward the end of the hour. I might reflexively glance up at the clock because I’m worried that she may not have enough time to finish. If I did this with five different clients, they might experience that one action five different ways. One client could interpret it to mean that he’s boring me and I can’t wait until the session is over. Another might think I just wanted to finish so I could make more money off my next client; a third might not even care that I looked at the clock, and so on. Therefore, I need to be acutely aware at all times of how anything I do or say might affect my client. And, furthermore, if he or she is adversely affected by something I say or do, I have to be prepared to make what Kohut called an “empathic repair.” So if I noticed that my client seemed upset I might say, “You were telling me something very meaningful and important and I looked at the time right in the middle of your story.” The client might then say something like, “Don’t worry, it didn’t bother me,” or “That’s what always happens to me. I feel like no one ever listens!” I might or might not then explain my reasons for glancing at the time, depending on the client and what she might need in order to move on.

As parents, we often assume that our children understand our intent, when in fact they often do not. This book will help you to become more attuned to what your children are experiencing when they act out, and then let them know that you do understand and empathize with their feelings, which is a kind of therapeutic parenting. You won’t be able to do that every moment of every day. I talk about it, teach it, and try to integrate it into every part of my own parenting, and yet I too sometimes find it hard to remember to do it.

That’s why it’s so important to be aware of our own agenda and the impact it has on our ability to be empathic. Often, when our children are unhappy or in pain, we just want to fix it for them. We want them to stop hurting and be happy. When they’re angry or acting out, we want them to calm down and behave. But that’s our agenda. What we forget at these times is that it’s important for us to hear what they’re thinking and feeling before we try to fix the problem. Even though our intention is to help, it can be experienced as invalidating when our child is upset. Just as in the example I gave about glancing at the clock, we have to wait for the right moment to introduce our agenda into the conversation.

Imagine that you have had a very upsetting day. Let’s say someone stole a great idea you had at work. You go home to tell your spouse about it, and he responds with his own agenda. He might say, “Well, why do you let people treat you that way? You should . . .” or “That happened to me once, and I . . .” That kind of response might leave you with an empty feeling because you really just needed to vent and to feel that you were being listened to. What we all want is to be understood. What you really wanted to hear is something like, “Someone stole that amazing idea about the . . . I saw you working on that! How does someone think they can get away with that . . . You mean he just presented it as his own?” The validation comes from having someone mirror and articulate exactly what we are feeling. That comes from paying careful attention to what the person said, her body language and tone of voice when she said it, and how it fi ts in with what you know about her or what you yourself would feel in those circumstances.

I know that when your child is behaving badly, the last thing you want to do is to let him think that’s okay—and it isn’t. But children are so reactive that to them, their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all one and the same. Therefore, if we get mad at them for their behaviors, they automatically think we’re also mad at them for their thoughts and feelings. Therefore, letting your child know that you understand—or are at least trying to understand— what he’s experiencing that caused his behavior is the first step you need to take in order to change that behavior. Until you do that, you won’t be able to take the next steps, which are to let the child know that the behavior is problematic and that you’ll be expecting different behavior in the future.

The strategies I discuss in this book are, as I’ve said, counterintuitive, and you may not fully appreciate their power until you experience their effect firsthand, as I have done hundreds if not thousands of times with my clients. I remember, for example, a little nine-year-old boy named David. He was very bright and socially successful, but he was extremely sensitive and reacted emotionally to events or frustrations a less emotional child would handle quite easily. He could be happy and laughing one moment, and sullen, sad, or furious the next. Some children seem hardwired to react more emotionally than others, but David’s mother had become so frustrated by his unpredictable and, in her view, extreme reactions and mood swings that the bond between her and her son had become frayed almost to the breaking point. By the time she was referred to me by her pediatrician things had gotten to the point where, as she tearfully explained, she could hardly bear the thought of his getting off the school bus each afternoon.

I met with David’s mother, Sarah, for a several weeks before ever meeting her son. She told me that she loved her child but was getting to the point where she cringed each time David walked into the room, wondering what kind of mood he’d be in. As a mother, she was devastated by this state of affairs, sad, and very angry with herself. I explained that the situation wasn’t her fault. They had come to this place together because of a push/pull dynamic that had strained the parent/child relationship, and it was David’s own frustration that had led to his difficult behavior.

Despite feeling hurt and exhausted, Sarah threw herself whole- heartedly into the program and worked incredibly hard at mirroring and connecting with her child. I coached her every step of the way as she rebuilt the frayed bond and got closer and closer to David. Before too long, David was in a good mood far more often, his sullen moods decreased, and things that previously would have sent him into a rage began to roll off his back. At that point, Sarah and I felt it was time for David and me to meet.

His mother drove him to my home office, and since he refused even to get out of the car, our first meeting took place in the backseat. I sat there with him and mirrored what he was feeling. “You know what?” I said. “You don’t want to be here. You don’t want to speak to me. You’ve been dragged here and you don’t want to be here, and my job is to advocate for you. So if you really don’t want to be here, I’ll advocate for you not to be here, but you have to know what you’re saying no to. I promise that I won’t ask you anything personal. You don’t have to worry. For this session I won’t ask you a single thing other than what you want to talk about.”

His mother had already told me how much David loved dogs, so I went back into the house and got our dog. That was enough incentive for him to get out of the car, and we sat on the grass together petting the dog. He then began to talk about how much he loved riding horses, and I started to mirror and engage with him about that. From there, he was willing to come inside, and we played a board game together.

By the second session, David began to open up, and before long he began to tell me about his feelings. “My mother’s mean and she hates me and she’s always yelling at me to stop crying or that there’s nothing to be mad about . . .” That is, everything Sarah and I had discussed but that David had previously refused to talk about. After three or four months, I received one of the most gratifying and moving phone calls of my career from Sarah, who said, “I can’t thank you enough. I have my son back.” This didn’t happen because I am such a brilliant therapist; it comes from tapping into the power of empathy and compassion, which is why people let me into their lives every day.

Mollie, David, and the many other children whose stories you’ll be reading have made me realize that the way to begin changing behavior is not by threatening, lecturing, or reprimanding, but by listening and caring. Discussing the problem, voicing your concerns, and offering guidance and limits also have a very important place in creating behavioral change, but only when they come after empathy.

When you yell at your child, he will feel threatened, and because he feels threatened he will defend himself with all his might. Personally, I cannot think of a single time when someone has yelled or screamed at me and I’ve said, “You are so right . . . I don’t know what I was thinking. I am completely wrong here. Let me see what I can do.” Even if I agree deep down, when I’m spoken to that way, I feel angry and humiliated, and I need to protect myself. It is no different for children. Just because they are younger doesn’t mean they feel things any less. When you reflect your child’s feelings or his experience to him with understanding, however, you leave him nothing to defend against. You create safety in the conversation and he is completely disarmed. This may seem like a simple concept, but as you’ll see, practicing it isn’t always as simple as it sounds.

At the heart of what I teach is kindness. Deep listening, caring, and compassion build strong, emotionally healthy children equipped with the neurological hardware to weather whatever life throws their way. Maintaining that kind of empathy is very hard when your child screams at you, throws tantrums, and says no to almost everything you ask, but it is the surest, most effective way to change behavior. And on a broader scale, it is also an ideal way for humans to interact, and helps build a better world one family at a time. Somehow, as a society, we seem to have decided that we need to make people feel bad in order for them to do the right thing. Approaching our children with compassion, setting reasonable limits, and supporting them as they make good decisions is a much better way to parent.

That’s what connected parenting is all about.