Best Positive Discipline Books for Parents and Educators

Positive Discipline Book Ideas – We hope you enjoy these parenting books about positive discipline techniques for toddlers, children, and teens. Learn positive ways to discipline a child at home or in the classroom with this collection positive discipline book ideas for parents, educators, and caregivers.

Positive discipline book ideas for parents and educators can be used both at home and in the classroom to learn positive ways to discipline a child.

Before I had my daughter, I spent my young adult years working as a nanny, teacher, and coach and studying to be a psychologist. I can recall spending hours of my time pouring over psychology and positive discipline books for parents and educators to help me take charge of the children in my care.

Once I became a parent, I added a few new gems to our bookshelf. Even though I don’t agree with every word written in each of these positive discipline parenting books, these were the best books I found about disciplining children for parents and caregivers.

You may fall in love with one positive discipline style and commit to it, or you may pick and choose several techniques that work to form your own style as my husband and I have done.

Related: Books that Help Children Understand Their Feelings

Related: Parenting Books Every Caregiver Should Read

Positive Discipline in the Classroom and at Home: Positive Discipline Books for Educators and Parents

I always recommend you look for these at your local library or used bookstore first. If you have difficulty finding any of them I have provided Amazon affiliate links for your convenience. If you click to purchase, I may earn a very small commission at no extra cost to you.

**Click on either the title or the image of each parenting book to learn more about it.**

No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame by Janet Lansbury

A must-read for any caregiver or parent of a young child. This book provides a practical, indispensable tool for parents who are anticipating or experiencing those critical years when toddlers are developmentally obliged to test the limits of our patience and love. It is presented in a way that shows the utmost respect for our children as a whole and complete individual. We can trust our children and the author explains why and how. 

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

This book is written by the experts that wrote one of my favorite parenting books — The Whole-Brain Child. It provides an effective and compassionate road map for dealing with tantrums, tensions, and tears without causing a scene. 

Instead, this book encourages parents and caregivers to intentionally engage in the situation in order to use these moments to teach our children what they need to learn to promote better behavior next time. I resonated with the idea of getting off parenting “auto-pilot” by not unconsciously reacting to situations.

Positive Discipline Parenting Books by Jane Nelsen Ed.D. 

Jane Nelsen, Ed.D. wrote a whole collection of excellent books on Positive Discipline for parents and caregivers. In them, she encourages parents and teachers to focus on respect, letting kids have control over some of their decisions, and allowing children to experience the consequences of their actions, both good and bad, in order to reduce conflict the home.

The author explains that the key to positive discipline is not punishment, but mutual respect. Nelsen coaches both parents and teachers to be firm and kind so that any child (from a three-year-old toddler to a rebellious teenager) can learn creative cooperation and self-discipline with no loss of dignity. Jane’s amazing collection of positive discipline books are listed below:

• Positive Discipline
• Positive Discipline: The First Three Years
• Positive Discipline for Preschoolers
• Positive Discipline A to Z: 1001 Solutions to Everyday Parenting Problems
• Positive Discipline for Teenagers
• Positive Discipline Parenting Tools
• Positive Discipline Parenting Tool Cards

Transforming the Difficult Child: The Nurtured Heart Approach by Howard Glasser and Jennifer Easley

Transforming the Difficult Child places the focus on reinforcing positive behaviors and playing down the negative behaviors. Nurtured Heart is the recommended discipline approach of Waldorf educators. As such, it places a refreshing spin on both parenting and teaching, and reveals new techniques and strategies that create positive behaviors.

The Nurtured Heart Approach shares a gentle and supportive plan of action that will change your children for the better, even if they are not difficult. Use the Transforming the Difficult Child Workbook by Lisa Bravo, Howard Glasser, and Joann Bowdidge to help use this positive discipline technique in the home or classroom. It presents Nurtured Heart techniques in an easy to read format that can help you better understand this approach to discipline. 

Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting by Dr. Laura Markham 

This book by Laura Markham is so popular the author created an entire peaceful parenting series to go with it. Her message: Fostering emotional connection with your child creates real and lasting change. When you have that vital connection, you don’t need to threaten, nag, plead, bribe—or even punish. More books in her peaceful parenting series are listed below:

• Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids
• Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids Workbook
• Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings

Mindful Discipline: A Loving Approach to Setting Limits and Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child by Shauna Shapiro Ph.D. and Chris White MD 

Parents today are bombarded with endless information that creates an atmosphere of anxiety and self-doubt in our children. This parenting book provides a lesson in mindfulness different from the rest.

Mindful discipline redefines discipline and outlines the five essential elements necessary for children to thrive: unconditional love, space for children to be themselves, mentorship, healthy boundaries, and mistakes that create learning and growth opportunities.

Out of Control: Why Disciplining Your Child Doesn’t Work and What Will by Dr. Shefali Tsabary 

Out of Control clearly lays out why we enter into dysfunctional patterns with our children and how to prevent them. The author claims that discipline and punishments don’t work. Why? Because the behavior we think we are correcting is not usually the core problem, so we often end up making matters worse.

In this parenting book, Dr. Tsabary explains exactly how this works as she guides caregivers towards getting what we really want for our children — a strong foundational center from which their own inspired actions can naturally arise.

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

I read this book for the first time as a class assignment in college. Reading it gave me the skills to communicate more effectively with absolutely everyone in my life. The authors do a great job teaching how to treat children like capable and worthy people, as opposed to irresponsible, unimportant, or unlikable.

They first convince the reader to stop criticizing children for how they think or feel and instead focus upon acknowledging how children might be feeling. The second point they emphasize is to make correcting behavior about the behavior, instead of about the child. A must read for all parents, teachers, and caregivers!  

This book about the importance of how we communicate is so popular that the author has created several more versions to help you with different age stages from toddler to teen! Click on the links to learn more about each one:

• How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk
• How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen and Listen so Little Kids Will Talk
• How to Talk so Teens Will Listen and Listen so Teens Will Talk

Parenting With Love And Logic (Updated and Expanded Edition) by Foster Cline and Jim Fay 

Love and Logic can help parents and teachers learn to think for themselves and problem-solve from a very young age. Parents can learn to embrace mistakes as wonderful learning opportunities to raise respectful, responsible, and caring children.

This positive discipline book helped me to form an integral piece of my parenting strategy, but I did not agree with everything written. I loved the concepts of natural consequences, enforceable choices, and encouraging children to think through their problems. My husband and I both found some of the examples encouraging, while others seemed a bit harsh and overdone.

1-2-3 Magic: 3-Step Discipline for Calm, Effective, and Happy Parenting by Thomas W. Phelan

I used one primary concept from this approach to form my discipline style and ditched the rest of the information. According to the author, the 1-2-3 Magic technique offers a foolproof method of disciplining children ages two through 12 without arguing, yelling, or spanking. In it, parents and teachers can learn to manage troublesome behavior, encourage good behavior, and strengthen the parent-child relationship using counting and time-outs. 

Although our family does not use the “time-out” method, I really appreciated the information offered in this book. I love how easy it is to get my daughter to do something I ask of her by simply counting. When she doesn’t do as I ask, I simply count to 3, and before you know it she does what I asked her to do! Most of the time anyway.

Whenever my daughter does not do as I asked by the time I reach the count of three, I then use the REI approach and say something like, “It looks like you need some help.” That usually gets her going. If that doesn’t work, I help her until she begins to do it on her own. Now that’s magic! 

Beyond Positive Discipline Parenting Books: Techniques that work

Another way we have used to discipline our child is to begin at the root of the problem.

To do this, we read books that help children understand feelings and emotions, books that help children manage anger, encourage our child to practice yoga, play with calm down sensory bottles, and give our child the opportunity for lots of outside playtimes to help keep the peace in our home. Click on the blue hyperlinked text to learn more about how we use each self-regulation strategy in our home.

I hope you and your family find these positive discipline books and parenting strategies as helpful as we have — Enjoy!

Learn more about Rhythms of Play HERE!

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