From Difficult to Delightful in Just 30 Days: How to Improve the Behavior of Your Spirited Child [Paperback]

First of all, my child does not have ADHD so I cannot speak about the portions regarding ADHD. Based on other readers' reviews, I sense that the author's views on ADHD have enraged some who have ADHD children.

Consequently, my opinion is that perhaps this book is best for parents like myself with very young kids with "normal" behavior problems that are not rooted in something biological or chemical.

I have a 5 1/2 year old who is very intelligent and can be delightful, but is much of the time whiny, complaining, demanding, and very negative at home. He is horrible at hearing "no" said to him and handling disappointment. On the other hand, at school, he hardly ever gets in trouble, he interacts well with others, and has plenty of friends. My son does not have a psychological condition, but he has been conditioned to act a certain way at home - I will not hesitate to take some responsibility for that. Personally, I felt like this book spoke to my situation.

The book is a fast and easy read. The methods described in this book were easy to understand and implement. Yes, perhaps it's intuitive that we should use positive reinforcement and not focus on the negative, but I will admit that I haven't done that very well over the years and this book gave me some guidance and inspiration.

I love that this book focuses on very young children - i.e., age 6 or 7 and younger, so it felt more tailored to my children. A lot of childcare books out there try to cover the gamut of children from infants to teenagers, and as a result contains a lot of extraneous material you don't need for your own childcare issues.

In the past 19 years since becoming a grandmother I have read many books so as to help with the grandchildren, who are now from 4 to 19 years old, and this is definitely one of the very best. I learned a lot, and have put it to good use. Heartily recommend it.

The book provides a system for positive reinforcement of good behavior. I agree with the author's basic premise that parent fall into the habit of reinforcing bad behavior via attention to it.

Ignore the diatribe against ADHD drugs if you want, I don't think it's all that well-founded, perhaps it's too broad brush. But I would agree with his diatribes against just about every other book every written on child rearing, lots of them teach parents to inavertently reinforce bad behavior. "The Incredible Years" is another good book, available from U of Washington Parenting Training program.