The Family: Dr. Spock of The Emotions

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THE FAMILY

With irrational finality, your child insists that his soup is too salty, his home work too hard. What should a parent do? Easy, answers Psychologist Haim Ginott. Just keep cool and coo some thing sympathetic, like "Oh, it's too salty for you. I wish we had something else," and "Yes, you do have a lot of homework." Chances are the child will eat the soup after all and resolutely go off to study.

As a growing band of grateful parents are willing to testify, Ginott's strategy of sympathy seems to work. The secret is that it encourages parents to show respect for a child's feelings with out compromising their own standards, and strikes a balance between strictness and permissiveness. Parents should draw the line between "acceptance and approval," Ginott says. "A physician does not reject a patient because he bleeds; a parent can tolerate unlikable behavior without sanctioning it."

None of this theorizing is terribly original, but thanks to a shrewd talent for translating well-known psychological principles into jargon-free "childrenese," the Israeli-born Ginott has gained a national reputation as a kind of Dr. Spock of the emotions. First published in 1965, his Between Parent and Child has been translated into 13 languages and has sold an estimated 1.5 million copies. Ginott is now a resident expert on the Today show, writes a monthly column for McCall's and frequently lectures around the country. A new book, Between Parent and Teenager, repeats the principles in Ginott's first volume almost word for word and applies them to adolescents. It has already become a bestseller in the three weeks since it was published.

Ginott's basic point is that mature parents can easily increase their sensitivity to their children, becoming demi-psychologists who seek out the source of a child's behavior rather than concentrate on its surface expression. With a little common sense, he insists, children of any age can be intelligently decoded. When they refuse to cooperate with a mother getting ready for the evening, she should be alert for more than ordinary balkiness and attempt to sympathize with whatever is bothering them. One kindly mother in that situation, Ginott reports, calmed her kids by saying: "I bet you all wish you could come to the theater with Daddy and me" —even though the line might seem capable of provoking some teen-agers into paroxysms of fury.

Ginott also urges parents to realize how easily their children read many levels into the most innocent remarks. Don't tell a cooperative child, "You are always so good—you are an angel," he warns; a child knows he is not always perfect, and is likely to feel anxiety under "an obligation to live up to the impossible."