Would you like to raise smart, happy, responsible children?

      Would you also like life with your children to be easy and fun?

Hello, I am Harvey Merriam, author of Three Steps to Easy Parenting.

If I could travel back in time and give my younger self one gift, I would give myself this book.  It would make my life back then so much easier, and my children’s lives would be easier too.

When I discovered I was going to be a parent, more than forty years ago, I worried that I might not be a good enough role model for a child.  Luckily I remembered something: three years earlier I had encountered two remarkable children, two of the happiest, most intelligent, most serene people I had ever met.  I decided to learn how they had been raised, and I soon realized that my success as a parent would depend more on what I did than on who I was.  I did what I needed to do, and my parenting turned out to be a wonderful, rewarding, and at times amazing experience.

I still had difficulties though—I was missing one of the three steps.  When my first child was seven I discovered the missing step, and from then on my parenting got easier and easier.

I began to dream of sharing what I was learning, so that future parents could avoid some of my mistakes and have even better parenting experiences than I was having.  When my first child was eighteen I decided to write this book, and now, twenty-two years later, it is finally done.

Unorthodox Ideas

The ideas in Three Steps to Easy Parenting are unorthodox.  Most readers wonder at first if the approach can possibly work—it seems too easy, and the results seem too good to be true.  As they continue reading, though, they realize that they are learning a reliable way to raise smart, happy, cooperative, and resilient children.  They know their kids will thrive, and they learn to relax, stop worrying, and enjoy their children’s wonderful company.

How to Get Better Results by Doing Less

All three steps toward easy parenting involve doing less:

Step One – Less Harshness (26 pages)

It is possible to raise children with zero harshness and zero punishment, and at the same time raise exceptionally smart, kind, and happy children.  Three Steps to Easy Parenting will show you how to do this.

With Step One, you can prevent aggression, fighting, bullying, stealing, lying, anxiety, sibling rivalry, loss of motivation, loss of confidence, and loss of intelligence.  With the help of Step Two, you can also cure these conditions.

“ . . . very fascinating!”                                                                               -  Erin Carman, Radio WGN 720, Chicago

Step Two – Less Interruption of Crying (71 pages)

Crying functions as both a distress signal and an emotional healing process.  Parents treat almost all cries as distress signals, and as a result they persistently interrupt healing crying.  Three Steps to Easy Parenting will show you how to support emotional healing and raise resilient children, children who bounce right back from hurts and disappointments.  If you are new to the approach, you will be amazed by the results.

With Step Two, you can prevent and cure fussiness, whining, sulkiness, surliness, spoiling, psychological addictions, and most sleep disturbances, as well as chronic sadness, timidity, shyness, anger, boredom, guilt, shame, and embarrassment.

“Where was this when my kids were growing up? . . . an excellent read!”                                                                                                                            -  Ric Bratton, This Week in America

Step Three – Less Control (56 pages)

Unnecessary control hampers children’s development.  It slows the development of judgment and wisdom, and it triggers rebellion, turning a cooperative relationship into an adversarial one.  Three Steps to Easy Parenting will show you how to raise cooperative, responsible, self-motivated children.  They will run their own lives so well that control would only get in their way.

With Step Three, you can prevent apathy, rebellion, secretiveness, susceptibility to peer pressure,  loss of cooperation, loss of curiosity, terrible twos, and awful adolescence.  With the help of Step Two, you can also cure these conditions.