Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control: A Love-Based Approach to Helping Attachment-Challenged Children With Severe Behaviors

Heather Forbes and Dr. Post introduce an amazing journey of healing and empowerment for parents of behavior challenged children in thier book. Their passion and desire to help and heal families is present in thier writing. The only regret I have from reading and using this book, is I TRULY wish it was used in our foster care and pre-adoptive training! Our struggles would have been lessened and our children hearts and souls healed much, much sooner. If your are a parent of a child with a trauma history, who have challenging behaviors because of thier abuse and neglect, and are struggling and praying for answers, this book will put you on the right road for those answers! This is a must have handbook for foster, adoptive, resource and kinship parents. Thank you Heather and Bryan, for stepping out of the box and introducing a parenting resource that empowers parents and heals children!!

This book was terrible and it's scary to me that something like this is in print. The first clue was the bashing of "traditional views". When someone is so intent on bashing other opinions, usually they are not too secure in their own. After reading this trash, now I understand why. What is really disturbing is that the authors actually quote Scripture but their message is far from it. The bottom line in the book is everything the child does is not their fault or their responsibilty. It is something in the parent that makes the parent upset by the behavior. God help the families that actually by into this message. I'm very sorry that I spent $20 on this book - even $1 would have been too much.

I enjoyed reading this book because the language is simple. It is not techinical but straight to basics. It demonstrates perceptions we have that chilren owe us as parents. Traumatized children have a different thought process. It validates the behavior and demonstatrates clear ways of thinking and processing so that the child as well as parent feel safe to rebuild a relationship/trust that was lost. The reader must be open to the process of thinking in a different manner. The techniques take time but the process helps to ease our fears as well as the child's. What we fail to realize that trauma is based on perception, we can feel empathy for a child who has lived in trauma. Just because we make things look good and feel that we are doing our best, that trauma still lives in that child and it will resurface thorugh time. Even for ourselves. I would reccomend this book to parents who adopt or even have chidlren that are ODD or angry.

We have been so indoctrinated with the "Tough Love" approach when our children get tough that it is hard for us to believe a different way can work. Heather makes us look at the risks of tough love and gives us good reason to look to the fear beneath the child's behavior and see that tough love only increases that fear. The child needs connection not disconnection in order to feel safe and once again regulated.

NONE OF THIS ILL-DEFINING PARENTING METHOD HAS BEEN VALIDLY RESEARCHED.

This is a rehash of Bryan Post's parenting programs, essentially based on the simplistic notion that if a parent merely acknowledges (or presumes) a child's emotions which are supposedly connected with a particular bad behavior, then the child will never repeat that bad behavior ever again; nothing more is really necessary. Thus the title "Beyond Consequences, Logic..." Others might suggest that children are more complex beings than that and need more nuanced and flexible interactions with their parents.

The parenting method in this book derives from "Dr." Bryan Post's longtime association with Martha Welch, M.D., author of "Holding Time." Welch is infamous for recommending and teaching highly abusive parenting methods (e.g., coercive restraint) and for her misconceptions about child development. For instance, she claimed to cure autism with forced eye contact and coercive restraint. Post took some of her wrong-headed notions and called them his own. Post recently declared he hasn't used Holding Therapy since 2001, but he hasn't denounced his past work, beliefs, or Welch, and some parents report that he still does some "mat work" with parents and children where they are roughly encouraged to work out their rage.

"Dr." Post claims to have a doctorate from Columbus University (note similarity in name to Columbia University), which is nothing more than a diploma mill not recognized by any accrediting agency. The Oklahoma Board of Licensed Social Workers disapproved of Post's use of the titles "Dr." and "Ph.D." Post had, until recently, a website selling "Secrets of the Wealthy Social Worker."

I would advise this book be avoided.