Parent with ACEs: Is it Time to Change Your Parenting Playbook [sfbayview.com]

OOPs wrong author, below.  Eda Le Shan is the author.  

Perhaps it's time to take Dr. Felitti's advice and begin to find ways to improve the overall quality of parenting in communities.

The most important thing for parents to know is that very small children learn by *osmosis over time*  not from direct orders or from threats/fear. 

If you provide a gentle, calm, supportive terrarium, 99% of the time you will get gentle calm and empathic kids -- *in a few years* .  Along the way there will be crayons on walls, melt-downs in grocery stores, and sibling fights:  these are all  perfect chances for a parent to model the gentle, calm, empathic way.    

But this is soooooo hard to do, especially  when the child is expressing the very emotions and anger you might have been spanked for when you were a kid.  A VERY good book is Selma Fraiberg's "When Your Child Drives You Crazy."    VERY insightful.... when your child is driving you crazy ask yourself why their emotion/mistake/behavior is so 'forbidden'-- probably it is touching an unhealed wound from your own childhood.

"The right brain of the mother becomes the right brain of the child" 

-Dr Allan Schore