The joys and struggles of the toddler years may be behind you, but they’ve been replaced by a fresh set of challenges.
Your child can now speak, yet truly connecting through conversation can still be tricky. While toddler tantrums are (mostly) a thing of the past, other unwanted behaviors can arise—especially as sibling dynamics can start to play a bigger role.
While many parenting books aim to help moms and dads raise well-behaved, well-adjusted children; the books in this selection go a step further, offering strategies to strengthen parent–child connections, handle conflicts and misbehavior in positive ways, communicate more effectively, and approach parenting with less stress and greater confidence.
From “gentle parenting,” to parenting techniques gleaned from hunter-gatherer societies, I’ll guide you through some of the most highly praised parenting books for raising early learners.
Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky
Undoubtedly the guru of the “gentle parenting” movement, and considered to be a foremost expert in this early age group is “Dr. Becky” Kennedy of print, podcast and internet fame. Admittedly not all of her methods are for me, I’m still on team time-out and rewards (no hate mail please,) but I have many friends who claim she has helped their families tremendously and reference her methods regularly. Whether you are a fan of her philosophies or not, you will find at least something useful that you can take from her book Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be. Dr. Becky’s parenting advice isn’t solely for parents of preschoolers, but it is particularly helpful for those with young children. Her book revolves around the central idea that there are no bad kids, every child (and parent!) is inherently good inside even when they may be outwardly behaving otherwise. As such, parents should respond to unwanted behaviors by trying to understand what needs of the child aren’t being met and responding with empathy and healthy boundaries. Dr. Becky excels in using real-life scenarios as examples and providing sample scripts for parents. I’ve tried to memorize a couple of her better responses, but unfortunately can never seem to access them in my brain in the moment. Fortunately for her adherents, Dr. Becky has her own app, so her helpful scripts and other tutorials can be accessed 24/7.
How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life With Children Ages 2-7 by Joanna Faber and Julie King
How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life With Children Ages 2-7 by Joanna Faber and Julie King builds upon their classic guide to communicating with children, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and adapts the strategies to speaking with younger children.
To help parents communicate more successfully with their children, Faber and King focus on the importance of building cooperation and connection on the foundation of mutual respect and empathy. Yelling, negotiating, punishing and bribing are all branded as counterproductive methods to effective communication. Faber and King’s advice provides a framework for positive communication. Foremost among these is their advice to acknowledge and validate feelings rather than dismissing them with sentiments like “you’ll be fine.” Additional techniques include offering choices (pajamas first or teeth brushing first?) to give them an element of control, enlisting your child to help problem solve, being playful, telling your kids what you DO expect from them rather than what you do NOT want them to do, and enforcing boundaries kindly, but firmly. Central to the method is the directive for parents to model the type of communication they want their children to learn. Personally, I’ll be diving back into the section on how to trouble shoot getting your children out the door, my personal achilles heel in parenting a preschooler.
Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
Though not explicitly geared toward any age, the book Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, suddenly became very relevant to my family in the last couple of years after the arrival of my second child. This past year with a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old have brought about a whole new set of parenting challenges in navigating the dynamics of a burgeoning sibling relationship. This book may be more or less applicable to your family at any given time, but for us, establishing healthy strategies for sibling interactions during the preschool years feels essential to building a solid foundation for years of future relationship navigation. Faber and Mazlish, are clear that the goal of their book is not to eliminate all sibling rivalry, which they say is completely natural, but to teach parents how to manage sibling conflict in a healthy way. In an approachable style of delivery, the authors articulate strategies like, avoiding any sort of comparisons a’ la “your sister always eats her breakfast,” acknowledging each child’s feelings, encouraging your kids to cooperate in activities rather than compete, and honoring each child’s individual personality. I sincerely appreciate that the authors don’t lecture the reader. Instead they use cartoons, stories, and sample scripts to get their points across and make their lessons more relatable and practicable.
The Whole Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
While The Whole Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson isn’t specific to the preschool years (it’s marketed for parents of children 2 through 12 years old,) the book’s lessons on managing your children’s big feelings and teaching them self-control seem particularly relevant at this age. It seems wise to start instructing your children on the tools to self-regulate their emotions from an early age so they can carry those skills forward. The Whole Brain Child helps parents understand how their children’s brains work, and how to take their brain development into account when responding to their “challenging” behaviors in a healthy and age appropriate way. Kids aren’t “bad” say Siegel and Payne Bryson, their brains are just still developing. At this early age children are still acting out of the emotional and impulsive parts of their brains. The book provides parents with 12 main strategies for teaching their children to access the more logical and reasonable (read calm) portions of their brain, as well as how to build their emotional intelligence. Strategies include methods like using physical movement to help calm the nervous system (we love kid’s yoga for this purpose,) reflecting on previous events during a calm state to reflect and learn from past experiences, or teaching kids to recognize and respond to their own emotions. All undoubtedly valuable skills for preschoolers.
Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff
I was very intrigued by the premise of the book Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff, that modern Western parents have much to learn from the parenting methods of more traditional cultures like the Maya, the Inuit and the Tanzanian Hadza people. After traveling to live among each of these communities, Doucleff claims that we can escape the high anxiety inherent to modern parenting by following the secrets she discovered to raising calmer and more cooperative children. In these ancient cultures children tend to be trusted from a young age, are integrated into adult life with the expectation that they contribute to the family, and are raised by calm non-reactive authority figures. There are some great tips to be gleaned by parents of young children, although some of the advice would admittedly be hard to practice in our current cultural environment. While it may be acceptable to send a small child on errands by themselves in a small traditional community, it would be more than a little frowned upon for a small child to be sent to the store by themselves in a modern American city for instance.Smaller concessions like allowing your child to traverse their immediate neighborhood with freedom, may be a more realistic application of the advice. Some of these contemporary prohibitions and norms may be some of the high anxiety practices we need to examine more as a collective culture than as just individual parents.
While not all of these books are geared specifically toward parenting preschoolers, they are all of particular benefit for caregivers of early learners. These formative years are an excellent time to lay a foundation for parent-child communication, positive familial relationships, and developing emotional intelligence. During these early years many parents are still seeking the parenting strategies that will work best for their families. For such parents, these five books may help to provide some valuable insight.