So here you are. Your child has done something wrong or hasn’t done something they should have done. In some way your child has not behaved as you want them to. For many parents this signals a need for discipline. And for most of parents this more often than not means negative discipline. It means taking something away such as a privilege or a possession or asking your child to do something that they don’t want to do such as a household chore or studying on a weekend evening.
But before you commit yourself to negative discipline here are a few points to consider that may result in a change of direction for your disciplinary actions.
First, never, ever, impart discipline where you are angry or upset. Discipline imparted when your emotions are high will invariably be of the negative variety. It will be punitive and in the nature of win-lose. It will be a contest of wills.
Second, in a calm moment reflect on what you want discipline to accomplish. Yes, you want a behavior to change. But don’t you also want something else that is perhaps even more important? Don’t you also want to raise a confident child with high self-esteem capable of making a positive contribution to your family and to society as a whole?
With this in mind, think about how to structure discipline so that it accomplishes both your short term and long term objectives. This is what we mean by positive discipline.
Let’s take an example of a twelve year-old who has just brought home a report card of Ds and Cs. Your first instinct is to lock him in his room until he reaches eighteen. No friends, no TV, no sports, no computer games or extracurricular activities. Take everything away that matters to him until he responds to your expectations and gets his grades up. After all, it’s for his own good.
But consider what will happen if you do this. You have isolated your child. You have told him that he is unworthy and in some way defective. You have removed him from the peer relationships that will help him learn important social skills. You have taken away his confidence and his self-esteem.
The key point however is that you are punishing your child for coming up short of your expectations but you are not providing him with any assistance to do better. You are asking your child to improve his performance using the same skills that resulted in poor grades but just doing more of them. It’s a bit like trying to screw something to the wall with only a hammer as a tool. Hitting the screw harder with the hammer is not going to get better results. You need to learn how to use a screw driver.
Instead, when you think of discipline think about the skills that your child is lacking and focus your disciplinary actions around helping your child gain those skills. In the case of the twelve year-old with poor grades, examine why this is happening. If it’s a case of what you consider to be poor motivation and an inability to focus then explore what motivates him. Does he love to have money in his pocket so that he can hang out with friends after school at the coffee shop? If so, then consider associating a monetary reward with good grades. When doing this its best to associate a monetary reward not with the end result but with the effort. This is an important message to keep in mind. It is not so much the grade but rather how much effort that is put into getting the grade.
Another motivational technique is to make studying mildly competitive. Using a timer is a great technique. Unfortunately most parents use a timer the wrong way. Typically parents will set a time for one hour or some other increment and then require their child to stay at their desk that long. The problem with this method is that it always places a child in a situation of failure. The best they can do is to break even. Most of the time they come up short. This can be very demoralizing. A better technique is to set a timer to count up like a stopwatch. Then the contest is always about doing more. The child is always winning, and winning, and winning …..
These approaches can also be applied to a wide variety of behaviors where more severe discipline appears to be appropriate. Perhaps your child has been caught stealing at the local gas station convenience store. Yes, you will have to take her to the store to apologize. But there is also more that you can do. To enhance your daughter’s sense of moral and social responsibility you can plan a trip to the local food pantry or a hospital for a day of service to others. You can also help your daughter to become aware of the marginal economics of the small business owner of the convenience store. Perhaps he might even be willing to sit with your daughter and share with her the story of the long hours he works and the small margins on what he sells.
Positive discipline techniques like these can be applied to a wide variety of behavioral problems where negative discipline has typically been meted out. The bottom line is that discipline should always be associated with positive learning experiences. A useful tip is to check your disciplinary decisions by asking yourself this key question: Will this discipline provide my child with an opportunity to experience success and feel good about themselves as well as correct the problem behavior? If yes, go for it! If not, then try to come up with a better solution.
Remember, without the teaching component discipline only results in fearfulness, deviancy, lack of confidence and low self-esteem in your child. This is not the future that any parent wants for their child.
You may also be interested in: "How to Choose Discipline Methods that Help Your Child Grow"
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