Communicating with Kids

The best way to bring up your child is to be yourself and do it your way.
Communicating with Kids is a book guaranteed to help all parents, whether they veer towards the methods of Penelope Leach or Supernanny, or have never read a parenting book before. It is not based on any parenting ideology or model, but on the author’s genuine experience with a wide range of children.
“I tried to follow all sorts of parenting advice when I became a mother and it took me years to realise that most of it doesn’t work and it doesn’t matter anyway,” explains Stephanie Davies-Arai, mother of four, who designed the ‘Communicating with Kids’ programme in 2008. “The more I learned through experience, the more fed up I became of reading popular parenting advice, which I knew would just create bigger problems.”
Stephanie’s new book explains how so often children are not resisting our messages but the way we are sending them. It demonstrates why some of the ways we communicate lead to exactly the opposite of the behaviour we want, and provides methods to tweak your language and approach so that children are willing to help you. So much of the parenting advice we hear works against a child’s developing brain, so Communicating with Kids shows you how to work with it instead – which makes all the difference.
Once you understand the difference between what you are saying and what your child actually hears, life with children becomes so much easier. This book is all about communication because apart from that, there’s no other advice you need. “I wanted to write a parenting advice book that basically says ignore all parenting advice, do it the way you want to, and here’s some information to help give you the confidence to do that,” says Stephanie.

Stephanie Davies-Arai is a mother of four and a founding member of a small primary school in East Sussex. Originally trained as a Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) instructor, Stephanie trains both teachers and parents, and has worked extensively with children in schools.