No-Drama Discipline
Reframes discipline as teaching, using brain-based, connection-first strategies.
It emphasises that the moments between parents and their children that require discipline, are actually some of the most important moments of parenting.
No-Drama Discipline sets out a model of discipline built on two moves the authors call connection and redirection. Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson argue that discipline means to teach rather than to punish, and that a child in the grip of a tantrum cannot learn until an adult has first met the emotion behind the behaviour. The book maps this onto brain development, distinguishing the reactive lower brain from the reasoning upper brain, and explains why a young child's capacity for self-control is still under construction.
For a clinician, the value lies in its account of how relationship regulates behaviour. Siegel and Bryson show how attunement calms a dysregulated nervous system before any teaching can land, and they catalogue common adult responses that escalate rather than settle a moment. Cartoon scenarios and scripts make the developmental theory concrete without reducing it to technique.
About the authors
Daniel Siegel
Daniel J. Siegel is an American physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Trained in pediatrics and in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry, he founded the approach he calls interpersonal neurobiology and serves as director of education at the Mindsight Institute. He is founding editor of the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology and the author of many books, among them The Developing Mind, Mindsight, Brainstorm, and Aware. He was a founding co-director of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center.
Tina Payne Bryson
Tina Payne Bryson is an American psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker (LCSW). She founded and directs the Center for Connection, a mental health clinic in Pasadena, California. A graduate of Baylor University, she earned her PhD at the University of Southern California, where her research addressed attachment, childrearing and interpersonal neurobiology. With Daniel J. Siegel she co-wrote The Whole-Brain Child, No-Drama Discipline and The Yes Brain, works that apply brain science to parenting and child development.
Details
- 2014
- Bantam
- Bantam
- 288
- 9780345548061