Positive Discipline A-z 1001 Solutions to Everyday Parenting Problems

Chapter 1 1 What Is Positive Discipline? As a parent you have a big job. You're the one who helps your children grow up to feel a sense of belonging and connection to the family. You teach your children social and life skills. You help your children feel loved. You find ways to ensure that your children feel special, unique, and important. You keep your children safe. How do you do that? With discipline. Perhaps you think of "discipline" as a means of control through punishment, but Positive Discipline is not about punishment or control. Rather it is about instructing, educating, preparing, training, regulating, skill building, and focusing on solutions. Positive Discipline is constructive, encouraging, affirming, helpful, loving, and optimistic. As children don't come with directions, parents need to find an approach that gives them a sense of confidence. Positive Discipline begins at birth and lasts a lifetime. That's right, it's never too early or too late to use Positive Discipline, because it is based on mutually respectful relationships in which you respect your child and you respect yourself. If parenting advice focuses only on the needs of the child and not the needs of the adults, it isn't mutually respectful. That kind of parenting encourages dependence and a lack of courage. If parenting advice focuses only on the needs of the adult and not the needs of the children, that's also not mutually respectfulit encourages submission, fear, and rebellion. With Positive Discipline, the emphasis is on a balance of firmness and kindness, and on providing respect for both adults and children. Positive Discipline, because it is neither permissive nor punitive, brings hope, increased skills, and love to your family. The more tools you have, the more you can teach your children. Part 1 is a reference to give you an understanding of the twenty-seven basic tools of Positive Discipline. These twenty-seven tools are referred to throughout the book, so be sure to read Part 1 before starting on the specific problems. Be Kind and Firm Many parents are plagued with guilt. That's because they are either too controlling ("I'm the boss") or too permissive ("Call me milquetoast"). Some parents are a combination of controlling and permissive, vacillating between the two extremes but not being consistent. Positive Discipline parents are neither. They practice firmness coupled with kindness. Which of the following styles fits for you? The Boss: You have all the power and your kids should obey you simply because you're the parent. Milquetoast: Your children are the center of the universe, so they have all the power. Kind and Firm: Your child is part of your family, not the center of the universe. You know your child's personality and can create boundaries without breaking your child's spirit. Still not sure which is your style? Here are more clues. Both the boss and milquetoast act instead of being proactive. That means that they wait till something happens and respond to it in the moment. Kind and Firm parents take a step back, observe and think before they act. They work on ways to show their child what to do instead of constantly saying YES! or NO! The Boss often looks for blame or fault and relies on punishment as the primary discipline tool. Kind and Firm parents look for solutions instead of blame and realize that the person who can and must change first is the parent. By changing yourself even in the smallest ways, you can positively influence your child's behavior. Milquetoast parents spend a lot of energy on what they shoulda, coulda, or woulda done. They tend to feel sorry for their children when they mess up, and are unwilling to let a child leNelsen, Jane is the author of 'Positive Discipline A-z 1001 Solutions to Everyday Parenting Problems', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307345578 and ISBN 0307345572.