Better Behavior

Better Behavior: Helping Kids Create Change and Improve Relationships is a practical and thorough guide for parents struggling with some of the most common parenting challenges. The book provides parents with the skills to effectively understand, and provide help for, a wide variety of issues ranging from negative behavior, to low self-esteem, to strained family relationships. 


In addition, the book focuses on critical skills for parents to help their children develop—the five core skills: understanding feelings, communication, flexibility, respect, and problem solving. Development of these skills is essential because they provide the solid foundation that prevents many negative behaviors from occurring in the first place.


The book also helps parents understand and balance the two main parenting influences: empathy and authority. Presenting a balanced amount of both empathy and authority provides parents with the ability to both guide their children’s behavior, while at the same time, strengthening the parent-child relationship. In this way, the book extends far beyond traditional behavior management techniques to offer parents a developmentally-based, complete guide for creating change in family life. 


Better Behavior’s unique accomplishment is that first it provides parents with a complete strategy for helping kids do better by looking at all of the relevant factors including: temperament, parenting styles, attachment and emotional attunement, family roles and dynamics, self-confidence and self-esteem, united parenting and much more. Secondly, the book highlights specific skill areas, with lots of examples and suggestions, to help both parents and kids gain the ability to develop family and social relationships based on cooperation and mutual respect. Better Behavior provides parents with many of the same insights and tools that a seasoned child therapist uses to help families improve relationships and create lasting behavioral change.  


Written by Noah Kempler, MFT, a licensed child and family psychotherapist, author and parent educator with over twenty years experience counseling individuals and families, Better Behavior is the culmination of a decade-long effort by Noah to create for parents a comprehensive guide for creating lasting behavioral change. The book accomplishes this and provides a truly unique contribution to parenting and behavior management by reaching beyond traditional parenting books to help parents understand how and why difficult behaviors arise, and then to help them develop the strategies and skills needed to create lasting change. 


Better Behavior has garnered critical acclaim from noted parenting and child development experts. Here are just a few recent comments:


“This book provides a practical, doable, and—most importantly—effective approach for helping struggling kids do better.” 

—Dr. Christine Carter, Senior Fellow, UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and author of Raising Happiness and The Sweet Spot


“This book is long overdue. If children came with an instruction manual they might have asked Noah to write it.” 

—Allen Berger, Ph.D., Clinical Director of the California Institute of Gestalt Experiential Therapy and author of Love Secrets—Revealed and other books