No-Drama Discipline is a parenting book aimed primarily at parents of toddlers, describing a disciplinary system that is based primarily on emotional intelligence and communication. In round numbers, the idea is that parents (and other disciplinarians, like teachers) should develop and harness a child’s emotional intelligence in order to control the child’s behavior. On the one hand development means helping a child learn about emotions - her own and those of others, how to process them, etc. On the other hand harnessing means using that intelligence to drive behavior in one way or another: for example, pointing out that hurting someone makes that person sad, and creating a feeling of “healthy guilt” when a child hits someone else - thereby discouraging children from hitting others.

At a high level it’s an approach I find very appealing, and I want to like it. It seems to be a good deal more humane than other popular disciplinary systems, especially timeout-based approaches. The authors of No-Drama Discipline suggest that timeouts communicate exactly the wrong message (“we can only be together when you’re behaving well”). I’m not completely convinced that they’re right - that is, that children understand timeouts in this way - but at a certain intuitive level it makes sense, and timeouts do seem a little rough; they can certainly be misused as well. Developing emotional intelligence seems like an unquestionably good practice in any event, and harnessing that intelligence is the natural next step as well; so in a sense this book is straightforward almost to the point of being tautological.

At the same time, it is a bit too high-level to be practical. Every disciplinary system will have its fault lines, scenarios when the system just doesn’t work or isn’t quite as full-proof as described. This one seems to have plenty of those, but the authors don’t really try to provide practical advice as to how to recover from those drawbacks; instead they just acknowledge that sometimes emotional intelligence isn’t quite sufficient, and shrug their shoulders as to how a good parent should survive those times. By contrast, books like 1-2-3 Magic - which does advocate timeouts - is a good deal more practical as to the nuts and bolts of the system, how it should work, what to do when it doesn’t, how to deal with special circumstances, etc. I think the strategic approach described in this book could benefit a great deal from these kind of tactical descriptions.

On the whole I’m quite glad I read this book, but I think there are a lot of gaps to be filled in with the ideas the authors describe.