Parenting with Kindness and Consequences by Barbara Frandsen is a guide on raising your child with love and kindness, covering discipline, communication, and teaching and learning. Parents and grandparents who are the closest relatives to a newborn become their first and primary teachers in life. Understanding how to communicate kindly and lovingly will prepare a child for future success. Frandsen demonstrates how to achieve this with detailed explanations of the theories and practices, examples of real-life situations, and comparing negative and positive responses, and how each will affect the outcome. Frandsen's years of knowledge and experience as a teacher, mother, and grandmother are apparent on these pages.

All parents want to do an excellent job in raising their children to create well-rounded individuals. Parenting with Kindness and Consequences by Barbara Frandsen is a contemplative, fascinating, and resourceful book that all parents, but especially new parents, will find as a source of comfort as they enter this new phase of their life of starting their family. It will give parents a lot of food for thought, especially regarding discipline, where Frandsen demonstrates how it is more effective to parent with natural and logical consequences. Children rarely learn from punishment and may develop resentment toward parents when they can't make a connection between the punishment and what they have done wrong. I also enjoyed reading about how parents can support language acquisition in the early years and their children's learning journey. This is an insightful book that parents will value.

Bringing a child into this world is one of the most beautiful things humans will ever experience. Still, if you think the birthing process over the odd forty weeks is the most challenging aspect of bringing up a child, then you are grossly mistaken. The real work starts when you have to teach that child the difference between what is acceptable and what is not. Unfortunately, it is at this critical stage that most parents get it wrong, and if not addressed as quickly as possible, this tends to bring about a downward spiral in the child's emotional growth. Sometimes even their physical development is affected. Barbara Frandsen believes there is an approach that is not just wholesome but easily adaptable to the present method parents use today, which would lead to the perfect all-around development of a child. Parenting With Kindness And Consequence is the solution.

Barbara Frandsen's book is designed much like a step-by-step guide that follows the progress of the child from birth right up to the early tweens. If you want to implement it, you should carefully follow the instructions while trying out her ideas. There are ample examples to guide a parent intuitively, with examples arranged in a simple scenario complemented by the appropriate solution approach. It takes an astute parent to understand the importance Frandsen places on using the spoken word with children. This aspect is often overlooked in other developmental guides, and I also enjoyed the cute letters included from children that brought a smile to my face. Frandsen is onto something big with Parenting With Kindness And Consequence. I may not agree with everything in the book, but this knowledge is priceless.

This breadth of expertise and wisdom is a rare find for caring parents trying their best to raise compassionate, thriving children while finding joy in the process.
~David L. Williams, bestselling author of Fighting For Her Life: What to Do When Someone You Know Is Being Abused

This is the book that new parents have been waiting for! A well-researched guide full of practical advice and empowering wisdom.
~Kirsten Brunner, Licensed Professional Counselor, co-author of The Go-To Guide for New Dads

This tried-and-true guide presents easy to read insightful information and research, strategies, and tips to promote successful parenting during the formative years of your child’s life. Each chapter provides topics that address ways to impact mental and physical development in children which leads to success in life.
~Linda Burleson, Administrative Supervisor of Elementary PK-5

I find this book most helpful as we venture into our challenging post-COVID time. Educating and parenting have been turned upside down—thank you for this resource.
~Claudia Kramer Santamaria, retired principal

Parenting with Kindness and Consequences by Barbara Frandsen is a fascinating, detailed guide to parenting that blends the professional and the personal into one coherent vision. With a strong emphasis on how parents can help raise independent, mature, and self-assured kids, this is a timely book, passionately written, and full of real-world, practical advice.

The title posits the fundamental juxtaposition at the heart of the book, a dichotomy that turns out to be a false one: should parents emphasize the positive but risk spoiling them, or be willing to discipline but risk being too cold and harsh? This is a false choice, as Frandsen writes, "You will never spoil your newborn baby by loving her too much," and goes on to detail her approach – rather than punish, what matters is connecting specific behaviors with specific consequences, helping to inculcate a sense of responsibility rather than culpability.

The book is exceptionally dense with information, covering a massive range of subjects and situations - from living around dangerous furniture to ways to help with dyslexia - interspersed with stories, anecdotes, and other real-life examples to illustrate the points being made. Structurally it is divided into seven sections, further subdivided into twenty-seven chapters, each of which in turn is comprised of several short, succinct treatments of the subjects under discussion. There are also helpful charts and other visual aids for presenting data or ideas.

The clear, easy-to-navigate structure of the book is very conducive to the taking in of its message, which is a fundamentally humane, sympathetic, and mindful approach to some of the thorniest issues in childrearing. The core message of the book is that there can be kindness in setting consequences - by raising children through calm understanding and empathy, the uniqueness of every child can be brought to the forefront, and the type of parenting will then follow. The book is not necessarily meant to be an instruction manual, as each child is different, but parents can use the information in the book to cater to the particular needs and idiosyncrasies of every child, for a unique approach that never relies on one size fits all.

The anecdotes are particularly fun and useful, illustrating the various real-world situations and tips for dealing with them, illuminating the trickiness of a circumstance or the effectiveness of a method in a different, more pragmatic way. This is not without its issues, however, as the book does somewhat rely on these personal narratives a little too much, while at times the writing style can wobble between scientific and informal in a way that feels more imprecise than natural.

These are small issues in the end, as the author's credentials in childcare and child psychology give the book immense authority, where facts and actionable advice take center stage. Packed with academic references and personal reflections, with hard data and the intangible benefits of experience to back up each point, Parenting with Kindness and Consequences is an original and comprehensive guide to being a parent in the 21st century.