Smart Love Press
What is Smart Love?

Smart Love is a kind and effective approach to parenting that is based on the latest knowledge of what a child’s mind is like at birth and how it develops through childhood. Smart Love shows parents that they don’t have to choose between hard discipline and soft permissiveness to guide their children’s behavior. There is a compassionate middle ground called loving regulation that enables parents to help their children learn to regulate themselves while building a deeply satisfying relationship with them. Smart Love helps parents focus on meeting the long-term goal of parenting: to raise children to become happy, secure, and successful adults who make healthy choices on their own.

The Smart Love approach to parenting was developed by Martha Heineman Pieper, Ph.D., and her late husband, William J. Pieper, M.D., and is described in the book Smart Love: The Comprehensive Guide to Understanding, Regulating and Enjoying Your Child (Harvard Common Press, 2001, reprinted Smart Love Press, 2011). Their most important finding is that we are all born to love whatever care we receive and to want more of it.



Because children learn to treat themselves and others as they are treated, Smart Love guidelines for managing behavior and nurturing children are always compassionate and kind rather than negative and authoritarian.

Smart Love offers an alternative for parents who are uncomfortable with formal methods of discipline and who are deeply concerned with helping their children make safe and healthy choices.

The non-profit Smart Love Family Services opened its doors soon after Smart Love was published. SLFS offers a range of services such as child development classes, counseling, parent coaching, and training and consultation in the Smart Love approach to other agencies. In 2010, the Natalie G. Heineman Smart Love Preschool was added to Smart Love’s family of services. The Preschool provides a play-based curriculum for children ages 3, 4, and 5 as well as programs for infants and toddlers with their parents or caregivers.

To learn more visit:
smartlovefamily.org
smartlovepreschool.org
Smart Love Family Services Video