Alan Kazdin is a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale and directs its Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic. His method is set out in The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child, and it is unusual among parenting books in being built on decades of clinical research rather than on a philosophy.
The idea it rests on
The positive opposite. Take the behavior you want to stop and name what you want instead, as a thing a child can actually do. Not "stop shouting" but "asking in your inside voice". Kazdin's argument is that a child cannot practice the absence of something, so a plan aimed at stopping a behavior has nothing in it to rehearse.
The three parts
| Part | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| The positive opposite | Every target is written as something to do, never as something to stop |
| Praise that is specific and over the top | Enthusiastic, immediate, naming exactly what was done, often with touch. Kazdin is insistent that vague praise does nothing |
| Points and rewards | The behavior earns points on a chart, and the points buy something. Temporary scaffolding, not a permanent fixture |
He reports the approach working in roughly four out of five cases with serious behavior problems, and expects better than that for ordinary ones.
Why it is worth knowing here
Because it is a reward chart, done by somebody who has studied why they fail. Almost everything on this site agrees with him, and the places families get it wrong are the places he is most specific: praise that names nothing, targets written as prohibitions, and points that come off.
The part hardest to run from a book is the specificity. "Over-the-top praise, immediately, naming the exact thing" is easy to agree with at nine at night and hard to remember at half past seven in the morning, and it is the half that does the work. A record that puts the thing in front of you at the moment it happens is not a different method. It is the same one, made survivable.