Adele Faber, Who Helped to Change How Parents Talk to Children, Dies at 96

Adele Faber, a former high school teacher who, with her Long Island neighbor Elaine Mazlish, wrote child-rearing blockbusters like “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk” and “Siblings Without Rivalry,” which became bibles for generations of parents, died on April 24 in White Plains, N.Y. She was 96.

Her death, in an assisted living facility, was announced by her daughter, Joanna Faber.

The parenting guides Ms. Faber wrote with Ms. Mazlish have sold more than four million copies in North America alone, according to estimates by their publisher, Scribner. “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen” has been published in nearly 40 countries.

Both Ms. Faber and Ms. Mazlish were mothers of three living in Roslyn, N.Y., in the late 1960s when they began attending parenting lectures given by the prominent child psychologist Haim Ginott. The author of the influential book “Between Parent and Child” (1965), Dr. Ginott was known for his view, daring at the time, that parents should speak to their children as if they were equals in dignity, instead of scolding or criticizing them as inferiors.

Ms. Faber and Ms. Mazlish were instantly enthralled. “We joined for an eight-week course and we stayed for 10 years,” Ms. Faber said in a 1982 interview with The New York Times.

In his lectures, Dr. Ginott “spoke about methods of communication that could speak to a child’s heart as well as his mind,” Ms. Faber said in 1985, in another Times interview. “New ideas like how to express anger without insult or substitute a choice for a threat, or how to give a child in fantasy what you can’t give in reality.”