A child wants a red race car, and the mother says no, the child melts down, the mother has an epiphany – all parents have these moments and parents need to know that children’s brains work differently than adults, they need to feel connected before they are corrected. That is the beginning of the book Connection before Correction: What Your Child Wishes You Knew by Schweta Merchant Gandhi. Written for the new age parents, as claimed by the author, who are raising children in a widely different world than the one they grew up in due to the collapse of the village, the age of instant gratification and the information explosion. 

Schweta Merchant Gandhi is a parenting influencer, a NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) – a field of psychology that is more often labelled as pseudoscience due to lack of scientific rigour in its approach – Coach, a TEDx Speaker, a podcast host and the founder of Happy Minds School in Surat. This informs her lens to parenting and writing the book. 

The book’s central premise is covered in the introduction – children’s brains are wired differently than adults, we need to connect before we correct, that is the child needs to feel safe, seen and heard, and the author spends the next seven chapters detailing the same using different angles. The first chapter begins with a rudimentary explanation of Dr. Daniel Siegel’s hand model of the brain, a psychologist and the author of another popular parenting book called The Whole Brain Child. This has to be the most useful chapter of the book. It helps break down how the brain functions in early years and makes it easy for parents to understand the basic neuroscience behind their children’s developing brains. The next chapter then moves on to ‘Understanding Tantrums’ which briefly covers why tantrums happen, the four most common tantrums and four frameworks, one of which – Name it to Tame it – is a popular strategy again mentioned in the book The Whole Brain Child. 

The next chapter is about ‘Discipline as Connection’ where the author tries to reframe discipline from a form of control to a way of connecting and teaching your child. The chapter also glazes over the gentle parenting approach without going into its depth. After that we have the chapter on ‘Subconscious Mind Programming in Kids’ which talks about how parents’ thoughts, tone, emotional climate affects a child’s inner voice, then a chapter titled ‘The Golden Triangle’ which details the importance of Sleep, Food and Rituals in a child’s life and ‘Play – Play – Play’ which is about the importance of play in children’s life.  The book ends with a chapter on what shifts in adolescents with ‘It comes Full Circle: From Toddler Tantrum to Teenage Tantrum’. At the end of the book, we have FAQs with questions such as, ‘What happens when grandparents undermine parents in front of the child?’, ‘What happens to a child when parents constantly disagree about discipline?’ and so on. 

The book seems to have taken the popular advice on the internet and converted it into a PDF style guide. These guides collectively make up a chapter. At the end of the chapter you have Multiple Choice Questions, True and False and Fill in the Blanks to check what you have understood. While the introduction claims, ‘Each chapter is grounded in research’, I could only locate 2 research papers (the first one at page number 169, and the second one at page number 193) mentioned throughout the book. You also notice a lack of footnotes and index of references that the author has used in her work. While there is no mention of the use of AI in producing the work, the book is laced with AI illustrations accompanying the key concepts of the chapter. The result is a lot of generic advice for parents packed in a 350+ paged Self Help book.  

Schweta Merchant Gandhi

The author had an opportunity to take this parenting advice and insights and locate it in an Indian context, but failed to do so other than sparsely mentioning the role of grandparents in few of the chapters. The book could have also added more value by focussing on a specific age group – Early Year, Toddler Hood, Middle Age or Adolescence but we have a book that tries to cover each of the age group. The same treatment could have been given to a specific need such as the The Science of Sleep or the importance of play but in order to cover everything that a parents need to know, we are left with half baked advice without much evidence about all important aspects of parenting. The book could have also connected back to the three reasons quoted by the author as the challenges of parenting in this era but failed to draw any connection other than the mention of how screen times are harmful for children. While the author uses some examples from her own life, the lack of real life stories, case studies or even how the strategy shared has impacted parents and children make it a book that is talking at the parents but not taking them along the journey.

The book failed to capture my interest, and I found myself skimming through some of the pages with the run of the mill advice and sheer lack of evidence. Any parent would benefit more from reading any other evidence backed parenting book, listening to parenting podcasts, reading articles and is bound to find more depth and research in these than the book offers. The book is clearly a missed opportunity when it comes to being a handbook for Indian parents.  

The book Connection before Correction: What Your Child Wishes You Knew by Schweta Merchant Gandhi is published by Penguin Random House India.