Should you feed your baby whenever she wants or put her on a schedule? Do you impose consequences on children who don't do their homework or clean up their room, or do you help them with chores and homework? Should you respond to the difficult adolescent with tender love or tough love? Parents are faced every day with a multitude of decisions, and they worry about making the right choices. The Smart Love Parent offers a breakthrough method to parenting created and tested by the husband-and-wife team of Dr. Martha Heineman Pieper and Dr. William J. Pieper. The Piepers offer a new understanding of the entire sweep of child development, allowing you to view the process of growing up through your child's eyes. Their patient and caring approach avoids the extremes of permissiveness and of the old reward-and-punishment style of parenting that turns parents into disciplinarians. By offering a relaxed and realistic timetable for your child's development, they identify some previously unrecognized developmental milestones and show you how to help your child reach them through guiding, not punishing. If you understand your child's point of view, you can better know how to love her and how to respond to her actions. The Smart Love Parent helps parents cultivate a child's inner happiness, which is the best means of ensuring your child will grow up well behaved, responsible, self-confident, and able to reach his or her fullest potential. Book jacket.