As testament to the notion that raising young children is no easy business, about 50 parents of preschool-aged children gathered at the New England Preschool Academy in Windsor Locks on Thursday, May 28, to hear parent educator Bill Corbett’s ideas on raising disciplined, happy and cooperative children. Corbett is the author of “Love, Limits and Lessons,” a book that counsels parents on using discipline to raise cooperative children.

Opening the two-hour program, Corbett explained how he came to write his book and create his Cooperative Kids parent educator network. His father, he told his audience, was a featherweight boxer who carried on his hitting outside of the ring, abusing his wife and his eight children. Corbett said he vowed not to repeat his father’s behavior in raising his own children.

His oldest daughter, now the parent of two young children herself, was almost a teenager when Corbett discovered “what I should have been doing all along.” From that discovery, he developed the program he previewed during his Windsor Locks presentation. “Love, Limits and Lessons” is the title of his nine-hour parenting course, and the basis of his subsequent book of the same name. His two younger children, he said, “were the guinea pigs that I used the methods on, and I tried it over and over until I got it right. Because I knew I was on the right track.”

Corbett brought out a toolbox that he used as a prop to get across the notion that parents have a set of tools they use to try to discipline their children. He easily got his audience to concede that they inherited their parenting tools from their own parents. His sample tool set included several oversize “playing cards” such as the “guilt card” and the “time-out card.” The other examples he offered up were a magic wand used hopelessly to obliterate undesirable behavior , the old-fashioned paddle when nothing else seems to work, an ice cream cone symbolic of parental bribery , and a megaphone to represent parents’ yelling and screaming.

“Parents talk way too much,” Corbett said. “When children hear you talking too much, they fall into something called parent deafness.” He said it was very much like the nonsensical sound effect used in a Charlie Brown cartoon to represent the teacher’s voice when the students weren’t paying attention. To his audience of parents with very young children, he said, “Now is the time you want to keep them engaged, so they’re listening to you.”

The danger of rendering young children parent-deaf , Corbett explained, is that in their teen years, they will be listening to negative peer groups instead of their parents.

To emphasize the point, Corbett played a short video in which comedienne Anita Renfro incorporated all the standard sayings a mother would use in a 24-hour period. The audience howled at the performance and the familiar reality of the over-used phrases set to the tune of the “William Tell Overture.”

Nancy and Jeff Johnson from East Granby sat in the back of the room with the youngest of their three children, their 6-month-old daughter. Like many of those in attendance, they had an older child who is a student at NEPSA in Windsor Locks. “There were some good things to take out of it,” Jeff Johnson said. “We were brought up in the autocratic style,” he said.

“We’d like to take a different approach ,” wife Nancy added. They both felt encouraged by what they heard and planned to begin applying some of the techniques they learned from Corbett’s two-hour mini session.