HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE
The seeds for this book were sown when we were young mothers attending a parent group led by the late child psychologist Dr. Haim Ginott. After each session we'd drive home together and marvel at the power of the new communication skills we were learning and lament the fact that we hadn't known them years before when we were working with children professionally-one of us in the New York City high schools, the other in neighbor- hood houses in Manhattan.
We couldn't have predicted then what would grow out of that early experience. Two decades later the books we had written for parents had passed the 2 million mark and had been translated into over a dozen languages; the lec- tures we had given in almost every state in the United States and almost every province in Canada drew large, enthusiastic audiences; over fifty thousand groups had used our audio and video group workshop programs in places as far flung as Nicaragua, Kenya, Malaysia, and New Zealand; and all during that twenty-year period, we kept hearing from teachers about the changes they had made in their classrooms as a result of either attending our lectures or taking our courses or reading one of our books. Inevitably they urged us to