Are You Afraid of Your Acting Out Child?
Part II: 7 Ways to Get Back Parental Authority

In part two of this series, James gives you 7 ways to get back parental control and stop living in fear of your child’s acting-out behavior.

Most people aren’t afraid of their children; rather, they’re afraid of their child’s behavior. It’s important to understand that this fear undermines your authority as a parent because it’s hard to set limits successfully when you’re afraid. You lose more of your authority each time you give in after your child has acted out. And as soon as he realizes that, you’ll only have the authority he gives you. You may get him to bed on time, he may eat his dinner and get ready for school, but those will be the things he’s allowed you to have authority over.

These kids tend to gravitate toward a “no accountability” way of life, where “no accountability” equals “no authority.” And in order for your child’s system to work for him, he has to keep all the authorities around him in check. Soon this becomes one of his primary goals in life.

You may get him to bed on time, he may eat his dinner and get ready for school, but those will be the things he’s allowed you to have authority over.

In my opinion, even though you might have fears about your child’s acting-out behavior, you need to learn how to deal with those thoughts and feelings so they don’t have power over you—that they don’t dictate your behavior. So while you may be afraid your child is going to throw a tantrum, don’t let that fear derail your decision to be firm. Remember, it’s not what you’re afraid of, it’s how much power you give that fear. I don’t know if people truly ever “master their fears,” but I think that over time, the fear of your child acting out will have less power over you if you stick to a game plan of setting limits and holding your child accountable.

By the way, when you decide that you’re going to start dealing with your child’s pattern of acting out behavior differently, first of all, get ready for a struggle. Your child is not going to believe it; in fact, he’s going to think that if he just tantrums a little harder or a little more, you’ll give in. That’s because you’ve given in for so long; you’ve trained him how to treat you. Some of us train our kids to treat us respectfully. Others of us, through no fault of our own, train our kids to act out more in order to get their way.

Here are some of the important rules I taught parents who were afraid of setting off their child:

1. Come up with a Game Plan
   The first thing I recommend is to come up with a game plan of what you’re going to do when your child starts to escalate. This will give you something concrete to guide you. Decide how you’re going to handle tantrums and acting out in the future. Ask yourself, “What am I going to do about this now? What’s going to be different in my behavior, my response?” Write an “Instead” list for yourself. It might include things like, “I won’t back down when my child starts screaming, instead I’ll leave the store. I will give my child consequences and set limits.”

   And then get ready for some long tantrums, especially at home. Make no mistake, there will be a fierce battle for a while. Things will get better, but be prepared for your child to test you and test you and test you. Sometimes the tantrums and acting out will increase in intensity and frequency. That’s because your child is thinking, “If I just do this a little more, maybe she’ll give in.” You’ve inadvertently trained him to do that and now you’re going to have to do some work to undo it. In the end, the behavior often changes—it may re-emerge at different times, but you just need to handle it the same way.

2. Explain How Things Are Going to Change
   When things are going well, tell your child what you’re going to do when he acts out or throws a tantrum. Say “Hey, I just wanted to talk to you for a minute. I’ve been thinking that you’re really too old to throw tantrums now. So from now on, when you do that, this is what I’m going to do.” And you tell them what consequences they will get. You can also say, “When you’re in a tantrum or acting out, I’m not going to give in, I’m going to let you go through your tantrum. When you’re done, then we can resume what we were doing. That means you’re not going to get that toy or that candy bar just because you yell and scream and kick your feet.” Or for older kids, “I’m not going to give in to you just because you punch a hole in the wall or scream at me.” And I think that parents should articulate that information to their kids no matter how old they are. If your child is very young, he might not understand at first, but it will help you as a parent to focus. If your child does understand it, then he knows what to expect. When parents consistently tell their young kids what will happen, the tantrums often diminish in frequency and intensity as the child grows older. With older kids, talking to them in this way lets them know that you’re the boss now—and that you’re not going to give in to their acting out anymore.
3. Let Them Know the Process
   Let your child know the process ahead of time. You can say, “Hey, when you tantrum in the store, I’m just going to move about five feet away and I’m just going to watch you tantrum until you’re done. I’m going to bring a book with me and if you throw a tantrum I’m going to read it. I’m not going to talk to you or argue with you.” And by the way, bringing a book is really a good thing to do because it shows your child that you won’t be moved by their behavior. It’s like you’re saying, “Hey, have a ball, pal. Dance around on the floor all you want, I’m just going to read my magazine.” It takes the power away from your child’s inappropriate behavior, and that’s exactly what you want to do.
4. After Your Child Has Acted Out
   After your child has had a tantrum or behavioral episode, it’s a good time to have a little talk with him about what he’s going to do differently next time. If your child is old enough, ask him what he was trying to accomplish, and how he will handle it differently next time. These are the most important questions you can ask because they lead to your child learning how to develop other options. Remember, problem solving is based on coming up with other options to deal with the issue at hand. So don’t ask “How did you feel?” or even “Why did you do that?” The only real thing you want to get out of it is for your child to come up with some other ways of handling his anger or frustration. In this way, your child also has his own little game plan to fall back on. When you help your child develop another response to that situation, he will learn problem-solving skills he can use for the rest of his life.
5. Don’t Let Fear of Assumed Judgment Control You
   Dont’ be a mind reader. Most parents have fears that other people are judging them when their child acts out, so they do things to appease their kids so they’ll behave. I think that’s a mistake. Realize this: people are going to judge you; people judge each other about all kinds of things all day long. But here’s the deal: you’re trying to raise your child so he can learn the life skills he needs to be successful. If you let your fear of criticism and judgment control you, you’re not going to be able to accomplish your task of raising your child effectively.
6. Don’t Give in When Your Child Says, “I Hate You!”
   Fear that your child won’t love you if you set limits on him is something many parents have a hard time with, especially when their child is old enough to say, “I don’t love you—I hate you!” But, again, if you give that behavior power, it’s not going to change. If you don’t give it power and instead understand that it’s just a stage kids go through, you won’t be influenced to back down. Kids love their parents; it’s instinctual. (Unfortunately, even kids even love parents who hurt or abuse them.) So if your child says they don’t love you, instead of getting upset, try saying, “Maybe you don’t love me right now. But you still have to do your homework.”
7. Get Outside Help
   I recommend that you get some outside help when dealing with this issue. The simple truth is that you can’t trust your willpower alone to get you through. Willpower is fine when it works—but as we all know, it doesn’t always work. Try to get a support system in place, whether that’s training, effective parenting classes, books you read, programs in your home, counseling, or a support group. You should have some outside support. It’s good to make the commitment to change, but in my opinion it’s much more important to get the tools from outside and then try to use them one day at a time. And give yourself a break: realize that some days are going to be easier than others.
8. Appeal to the Authorities
   If your child is behaving criminally, the sooner you can get him into the juvenile justice system, the better. Although the wheels of justice turn slowly, your child will eventually get a probation officer who will then have the power to hold him more accountable than you can. So when your child doesn’t go to school, he will have to answer to his probation officer as well as you. If he misses school enough times, hopefully the probation officer will take some action. I worked with some parents who had a probation officer behind them who supported them. The probation officer would lock their child up in the youth center for a weekend if he or she violated the rules. I saw changes take place in those families. The kids started going to school; they stopped hurting others and damaging property. Their behavior changed because there was an accountability system in place that didn’t let them slide.

I always tell parents to understand that there is no quick solution to this problem, especially as the child grows older. Rather, you have to learn how to manage your child’s behavior in a way that diminishes the power of their acting out. The end goal is that your child will learn other ways to solve problems besides using power or intimidation. Just remember, kids don’t surrender power easily; neither do adults. Nobody likes to give up power, so it’s not going to happen over night.

In the thirty years I worked with kids, I saw families make progress all the time. They stopped letting their children box them in with their acting-out behavior; these parents instead worked toward the goal of helping their kids learn new skills. Remember that no family is perfect. People make progress, fall back, make more progress, and even fall back again. But in the long run, families changed and these kids learned other coping skills.

Some people say that the parents are the problem, but I don’t think that’s right. I think parents are the solution, and they need training and support.

James Lehman is a behavioral therapist and the creator of The Total Transformation Program for parents. He has worked with troubled teens and children for three decades. James holds a Masters Degree in Social Work from Boston University. For more information, visit www.thetotaltransformation.com.

Are You Afraid of Your Acting-Out Child? Part I: Why Giving in is a Dead End

Do you walk on eggshells around your child, afraid of doing anything to set him off? Do you appease him when you notice he’s winding up to throw a tantrum? In part one of a two-part series, James Lehman, MSW explains how fear of acting-out behavior sets up a dangerous pattern for your child—and the whole family.

“Now you’re negotiating on your child’s terms; your fear that he’s going to act out is going to dictate how much you give in.”

All parents experience fear for their kids. They worry about their children getting sick, doing well in school, and whether or not they’ll be able to get a job and succeed in life. Being afraid for your kids is very normal, but being afraid of your kids is a phenomenon that has developed over the past several decades, and something that parents need to look at closely. And by the way, sometimes these two fears are actually tied together—fears about their child being able to make it in life actually will cause some parents to think they have to give in more; they become a cushion for their kids because mastering life skills seems so difficult for their child. But let me be clear: that’s exactly what you don’t want to do.

Young Kids: How the Pattern Starts
When a child is two or three, he learns to respond by saying “no” all the time. He starts resisting and asserting his individuality from his mother and father and often manages his anger and frustration by throwing temper tantrums. Some parents learn that you just have to wait those tantrums through, but others begin to worry that they’re not able to manage their child or that they are not in control. Others worry that if they don’t give in—if they say “no” to their child—their child won’t love them anymore. In effect, these parents become afraid of their child’s acting-out behavior and are held hostage by it. They get worn down and often begin caving in to inappropriate demands as they try to appease their child instead of remaining firm and waiting the tantrum out.

So their young child develops a pattern of acting out because it works for him—it gives him power and gets him what he wants. When the tantrum happens in public, the parent feels embarrassed, humiliated, and ashamed. When it happens in private, they feel stuck in this negative cycle with their child: they’re alone in the house and their child is screaming and yelling and kicking. Their life seems crazy and out of control, but they don’t know how to stop it without caving in to their child.

These kids soon learn to blackmail their parents with the threat of throwing a tantrum. Pretty soon, the parent starts giving in as soon as their child starts to signal that they’re going into a tantrum: maybe their child’s voice escalates or becomes shrill, or maybe they stomp their feet and scream “no.” Once that happens, a very serious pattern has begun. Now the child has actually trained the parent to give in to their demands, no matter what. If your child knows he can get you to give in by behaving inappropriately or destructively, he’s going to learn to give you those cues. It’s just like being in a play: when you get your cue, you’re going to read your lines: “It’s OK, don’t do that, I’ll get you the toy.” Or you’re going to bribe him: “Well, if you can hold off for five minutes, then I’ll get you a candy bar in the car.” What you’re really doing is negotiating on your child’s terms; your fear that he’s going to act out or that you can’t handle the tantrum is going to dictate how much you give in.

And by the way, parents don’t know this pattern is forming while it’s happening. This is not a conscious thing where people say “I’m going to give in to my kid and then he’s going to become a monster.” They’re saying, “Oh man, I can’t handle this right now.” And their child learns from that lesson that when you can’t handle something, he’ll get what he wants. So his goal then, when he wants something and you tell him no, is to set up situations you can’t handle. Remember, this is not a moral issue for your child: it’s not about being good or evil. Your child is not really conscious of the effects of his behavior other than it gets him his way. Children, like all living things, learn to take the easy way out. The important thing is not to blame your child or assign diabolical motives to his behavior.

It is important to realize that if your child is using inappropriate behavior to get his way, it’s not a phase that will magically stop when he turns ten or twelve or even fifteen. That pattern of behavior may continue on through adolescence and into young adulthood.

Acting Out in School: When Your Child’s Behavior Controls Others
If a child has successfully used inappropriate behavior at home, you will often see them trying it out at school. After all, if their strategy works on their parents, why shouldn’t it work on their teachers, too? In kindergarten and first grade if they don’t get their way they may escalate. They may tantrum, call people names, throw things on the floor and walk around in the classroom when they’re supposed to be sitting down. It’s important to note that for a significant number of children, the classroom structure that teachers utilize will be sufficient to change some of these behaviors.

I’ve found that many of these kids also have a learning disability or some other factor that interferes with their ability to learn to solve problems. Think of it this way: if you have dyslexia, Attention Deficit Disorder or auditory processing problems, you might perceive the world as a threatening place. For these kids, it’s often much harder to learn how to solve social problems through reasonable negotiating, being patient, and learning how to accept no for an answer. So what tends to happen is they solve their problems by acting out—and that becomes their one default skill. They’ve developed this one trick: “Agree with me or face my crappy behavior.” And that can become their strategy for solving all problems. “Give me my way or face my crappy behavior.” They do this in school, at home, and on the bus and as long as it works, they will continue to use it. Not only is the child controlling others with his behavior, he’s not learning the problem-solving skills that he desperately needs to learn to be able to make it in life. If everyone around him is backing down, all he’s learning is how to threaten and intimidate others through fear.

How This Affects Your Family
Realize that if you have one child who controls the house with inappropriate behavior, this is not just your problem: it’s also a problem for your other children. Make no mistake, dealing with an acting-out sibling can have a great and long-lasting influence on your other kids’ personalities. When siblings don’t know when, how or why their brother or sister is going to explode, it’s overwhelming and scary because they can’t control it. What often happens in these cases is that kids develop their own sub-type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They will learn not to show their feelings. They may hide out in their rooms and submerge their emotions. That’s because in their world, it’s not safe for them to do so. It’s not safe to show your feelings; it’s not safe to say how you feel. After all, their sibling could explode and take it out on them at any given moment. So these kids wind up very flat emotionally; there seems to be no joy in their lives. There are things parents can do to correct these destructive patterns, but nonetheless, it’s hard on everybody. [Editor’s note: for more on this topic, read James Lehman’s article, ”The Lost Children: When Behavior Problems Traumatize Siblings”.]

The First Step toward Changing Your Child’s Behavior
When parents used to come to me with this problem, I’d say, “We’re going to come up with a plan to change what’s happening in your house. Let’s figure out some things for you to do when things get tough so you can empower and support yourself.” I think it’s nearly impossible for people to try to rely on willpower alone to change their parenting style. Here’s the truth: their child’s behavior wasn’t going to change unless the parents’ behavior changed. I believe if you work at it, things will change; and if you don’t, things will stay bad or get worse. The kid who’s throwing a tantrum today is going to be throwing your chair across the room in ten years. And that’s how he ups the ante as he gets older. Most kids escalate; it’s a natural progression. They have to be more intimidating. When you’re 13, it’s very awkward to lie on the floor and throw a tantrum. It’s much easier to throw something across the room and hit the wall. You see these kids punch holes in walls all the time; that is the evolution of their tantrum. Certainly as they get older, the intimidation becomes more real. There are kids who hit and push their parents. There are kids who intentionally break and damage things around the house. There are kids who hit their siblings or hurt them emotionally by calling them foul names. And make no mistake, this becomes a very real problem.

If your child has trained you to be afraid of him and back down when he acts out, realize that whatever authority you had originally has diminished over time. When these kids are really in flower—when they’re really showing who they are—you can’t tell them anything. They’ll tell you to kiss their butts. You can’t tell them when to come in at night; if you put them in their room, they’ll climb out their window. Basically, they’ll come and go as they please and they’ll say, “You can’t stop me.” The sad part is that unless you change the way you parent and start holding them accountable, they’re right.

In next week’s article, James Lehman will give you 7 tips on how to stop living in fear of your child’s inappropriate behavior—and learning how to start parenting more effectively.

James Lehman is a behavioral therapist and the creator of The Total Transformation Program for parents. He has worked with troubled teens and children for three decades. James holds a Masters Degree in Social Work from Boston University. For more information, visit www.thetotaltransformation.com.

We’ve all seen them. We know they’ve got a secret, some kind of deep knowledge we lack. How else could they do it? How can the people who work with children every day somehow manage to keep twenty and thirty children behaving properly… when we can barely keep up with our own two children at home? What secret parenting techniques could we learn from them, and how do we get them to teach us?

There are a lot of theories that don’t involve parenting techniques. There are those who say that children are naturally social, and if you provide a group activity they’ll simply go along with it. There are others who say it’s just the vast array of toys and games and art supplies; if you packed your house as full of child-friendly activities, your children would be that well-behaved, too.

While there is some truth to these methods, the real secret is a bit more subtle than that. Yes, children are social, and will act as a group; you can see them collecting into groups on the playground, even if they don’t know one another. And yes, having something child-friendly to do at any turn helps… ask any aunt or uncle who’s tried to babysit how children act in a house with no toys or games suited to their age. But there are real parenting techniques here, which we as parents can learn to employ.

The key element, which most of us miss because we simply don’t observe the right things, is that the child care professional does not set the children to doing something and then leave – but remains to interact with the children. As parenting techniques go, it seems simple and obvious… but how many of us do it?

The basic reality is that children, no matter what toys and games they are provided, crave the attention and approval of others. This is why they collect in groups themselves – to offer their own attention and approval to one another. But as we all know, children are often unwilling to be supportive at all times, and arguments can break out. It’s amazing how many sophisticated parenting techniques come up wanting, next to this simple and effective method: just pay attention to the children.

Of course, we all have things to do during the day. How can we get them done, if we’re constantly paying attention to the children? The answer is so simple as to be profound – involve the children in your daily routine. While going about your daily tasks, take your children with you, and explain what you are doing and why… with occasional questions to involve the child in displaying an understanding.

There are certainly other parenting techniques that can be used, and you’ll definitely want to know more than this “secret” of the child care professionals. But it’s honestly that easy; involve yourself with your children, and your children in your daily life. As a great man once said, all else is commentary.

To learn more about parenting toddlers, check out the Talking to Toddlers Audio Course. For parenting older children, I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

As parents, we all understand the trials of parenting. Mistakes are common; indeed, they are part of the territory. The process of learning to be a parent is difficult, and our first child is always the trial by fire. The second child is almost never as much like the first as we expect, and we learn rapidly that what works with one child doesn’t necessarily work with another.

Even the third and successive children present new problems, frequently revolving around the idea of fairness: the rules for one child should, after all, be the same as the rules for another. Sometimes this can be difficult, and parenting mistakes occur as a result. But how do you fix them – or, even better, avoid them?

One of the most common parenting mistakes is to think that your child doesn’t understand the situation, so it’s not important to be fair. Children have long memories; whenever a situation is important to them, for whatever reason, they will recall that situation for many years to come… potentially into adulthood. Even though your child cannot process and interpret your actions today, those actions may very well be remembered later – and they will be processed and interpreted by an older child, who is more than capable of understanding them.

Another of these parenting mistakes – one almost every parent is guilty of making at some point – is to expect all children to be the same. Whether we’ve got multiple children ourselves, or simply have experience with other people’s children, there are many elements of a child’s personality that simply are not the same as other children. While there are certainly common areas of behavior and intellect among all children, these are not as large as most of us expect.

Which leads us to the last of the common parenting mistakes most parents make: relying too much on our own experiences as children. The way our own parents dealt with situations is not always the best way, and the way we would have liked them handled as children is not always the way we should handle them as parents. Our children are not the same children we were, and they certainly don’t live in the same kind of world.

The most important question, of course, is how do we avoid these parenting mistakes? How do we remain mindful of how our actions will be remembered, understand the differences among children, and avoid too much reliance on our own childhood?

As with most parenting questions, there are no easy answers – but unlike our own parents, there is much more detailed help available. Simple awareness can be enough to avoid these parenting mistakes, but there are many programs available that can help us raise our children effectively and intelligently… without having to become experts in child development ourselves.

There’s no way to avoid all parenting mistakes. We’re human; we make mistakes. But with a little thought and effort, we can avoid the larger ones, and raise our children quite well all the same.

To learn more about parenting mistakes I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

One of the things that we all understand about children is that they need discipline. The big question, and one that is rarely addressed, is how exactly to do this – we have the old disciplinary methods our own parents used, and a large number of new childhood discipline methods that modern parents are encouraged to use, but it can be very difficult to figure out which methods really work.

But what does it mean, exactly, for childhood discipline to work?

What is discipline?

In most cases, we think of the punishment our children receive as discipline. We institute childhood discipline with consequences, to demonstrate to them what should and should not be done. What behavior is acceptable, and what behavior is not acceptable. We teach them a framework of rules by punishing them when they step outside that framework, breaking those rules.

But is this discipline?

When we say that an adult is disciplined, or has discipline, do we mean this adult has been or shall be punished?

Or do we mean something else entirely?

It’s important, when developing a childhood discipline program, that we understand what discipline is – and why what we do is discipline. The key element of childhood discipline is not to be punished, or to face consequences, but to consider the future. A disciplined adult acts with knowledge and forethought, considering the likely result of an action before taking it.

This is why childhood discipline so often fails.

The value of childhood discipline is not whether it causes the child to feel sorry, or to experience remorse, or even to avoid “naughty” behavior. It is whether the child comes away from the experience with a stronger and better ability to predict the likely result of future actions. And most childhood discipline programs, provided by parents who are almost never trained or experienced in developing such programs, fail miserably in that regard.

A program of simple punishment and consequence does not teach the crucial problem solving skills that children need to learn how to predict the results of their actions. Experts in the field, such as James Lehman and others, have developed far more effective childhood discipline programs that support the real needs of children as they develop into adults.

The most important behaviors all children need to learn begin with the critical skill of reading social situations – understanding other people, what they want, what they expect, and how they are likely to behave when things happen. And these skills begin, for each of us, with an understanding of ourselves… understanding what we want, and expect, and how we’re likely to behave.

In short, your children need to learn and understand what they want and expect, and how they behave when they want and expect those things. This is the cornerstone of childhood discipline; understanding whether the way they behave will result in the things they want and expect – and in time, how to behave so the things they want and expect actually happen.

To learn more about childhood discipline I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

When your child has ADHD, it can feel like nothing ever works – like every tactic you’ve learned for discipline simply isn’t effective, and indeed just seems to make things worse.

The frustration, for most parents dealing with childhood ADHD, is that long before you know what it is… you know that nothing you try works. You know that expert after expert, book after book, program after program is just plain not working. It’s not that you aren’t trying; you’re trying everything. You’re getting all the help you can, trying all the techniques you can, and working harder than you’ve ever worked before.

But childhood ADHD changes the rules. Many of the tactics you’re given for “normal” children don’t work at all, and many others do exactly the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. For a child with ADHD, the disciplinary approach needs to be a little different, and you need to take this into account.

The most important difference in childhood ADHD is that these children crave positive attention far more than they fear negative attention.

Instead of recognising the negative behavior and attempting to correct it, the more effective way to handle childhood ADHD is to recognise positive behavior and praise it; in the psychological community, this is sometimes called “shaping” and can provide remarkable results in a very short time.

Another often-overlooked method with childhood ADHD is the use of teamwork. Much of the trouble a child with ADHD encounters is that being so unlike the other children makes it hard to find friends, and a great deal of this can be overcome with simple teamwork between parent and child.

By sitting and doing things together with your child, you provide a role model – an example of appropriate behavior, which is critical in childhood ADHD if the child is to learn how to behave appropriately. A little patience and time go a long way. Apply the shaping methods above, rather than correcting inappropriate behavior, and most children rapidly get the idea and follow along.

It can be difficult to learn all the tactics and techniques that work well with childhood ADHD, so many parents may prefer to get a predefined program from a professional. The danger with these programs, of course, is that several of them simply do not cover the needs of childhood ADHD at all; while a great many do work, there are even more that do not. James Lehman’s system, the Total Transformation Program, is one of many that provide an excellent series of disciplinary tactics and techniques that work well even with childhood ADHD.

Over time, the trials and hardships of childhood ADHD can be lessened, simply by applying a few basic rules and guidelines that are easily learned. Parents can improve their own lives… and, more importantly, the lives of their children… by adapting their approaches to the specific needs of childhood ADHD.

To learn more about childhood ADHD I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

Of all the things you teach your child, discipline is both the easiest and the hardest to define – as strange as that may sound. We all know how a disciplined child looks and acts, but how do we explain what exactly gives that child discipline while another child is undisciplined? What do we mean when we say a child has discipline?

One of the more insightful definitions of discipline, although the source is long lost, is that “discipline is doing what you know to be the right thing – even when it is inconvenient.” For a child, discipline is extremely difficult, because inconvenience often seems like the end of the world… “if I can’t have one more piece of cake, I’ll die!”

Dramatic dessert proclamations aside, how do we instruct children to do what they know to be right, even when it is inconvenient? How do we teach a child discipline, when we ourselves frequently don’t have enough of it? Whether it’s our diet, our exercise routine, the housework, or even our jobs – adults frequently, and to our own detriment, do not display as much discipline as we should. How can we teach our children something we do not ourselves seem to know?

The answer, of course, is that we have far more successes than failures in the realm of discipline. To a child, discipline is frequently portrayed as doing the right thing all the time, at every single opportunity. In reality, of course, we do not show perfect discipline at all times… but we show a remarkable amount of it. We shower every morning, change our clothes after work, cook dinner every night, brush our teeth two or more times a day – there are a great many things we do that are inconvenient, but we still have the discipline to do them.

To teach your child the importance of discipline, focus on the success, and not the failure. Rather than simply chastising the child for not cleaning his bedroom or brushing her teeth, make sure to see and recognise the discipline your child does display; sitting through an entire movie, helping to load the dishwasher, even the smallest things are – to your child – discipline. Notice the choices your child makes, and recognise the ones that show an understanding of discipline.

The focus on positive discipline, and not on the lack of it, shows your child discipline every day; not only in the things your child does, but in the things you do. Understanding that discipline is not an all-or-nothing concept, but something that should be held most of the time, can go a long way in helping your child understand discipline… and develop a healthy amount of it in adulthood.

To learn more about child discipline I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

Every parent, at some time or another, needs to deal with the problem of a defiant teenager – the times, whether frequent or infrequent, that your teenager simply doesn’t want to do what you expect. This can be terribly frustrating, not simply because your expectations aren’t being met, but because a teenager certainly has the mental and emotional resources to understand those expectations.

In general, a defiant teenager has a social and psychological need to be in control. A teenager is at once not a child, but still not an adult – capable of making choices and taking actions that have real and serious impact, but without the wisdom of age and experience to guide those choices and actions.

Having been there ourselves, and gained this wisdom and experience, we want to help our children make these choices and take these actions properly. The defiant teenager is not simply rebelling for the sake of rebellion, but recognizes on some level that simply doing as he or she is told will not provide that wisdom and experience.

Teenagers make the bad choices they do, not because they desire the undesirable outcomes of those choices – but because they do not have the skills to solve problems as effectively as adults. A defiant teenager does not simply want to be defiant, but wants instead to experiment with problem-solving tactics that will be useful in adulthood.

Once you understand this dynamic – that your defiant teenager is not defying the wisdom and experience which leads to the proper and correct choices, but defying instead the demand of a choice without explanation of the wisdom and experience behind it – a more productive dynamic can evolve.

Even the most defiant teenager is usually equipped to understand the basic rules of cause and effect. Instead of telling your teen which choice to make, help reason through the choice – speak directly to the decision being made, without being emotional or angry about the subject. If you’ve had experience with the same choice, telling your teen about this experience directly… what choice you made, why you made it, and what happened in the end… goes a lot farther than simply dictating the “correct” choice.

In short, it is far more effective to join the team with your defiant teenager than to install yourself as the coach. As James Lehman, MSW, observes: “The motivation is to do things their way, not yours, and to retain power.” By aggressively promoting the “right” decision, we take power away from our children, and they resist – but by joining the team, we can exert our power together on the problem, instead of on one another.

Once your defiant teenager understands, through consistent experience, that the two of you are on the same team and working together to solve problems – instead of trying to assert power over one another by being the one to make the decision – the defiance rapidly dissipates.

To learn more about dealing with a defiant teenager I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

Parents the world over are in a constant search for the education that can lead them to the most effective parenting. Skills that can appropriately discipline our children, not merely punish them, are the pinnacle of parental achievement; we’re constantly seeking the best and most effective parenting skills.

It’s important to understand, in that search, what exactly we mean by “effective.” Parenting skills that worked in previous generations are not always appropriate to the modern child; the newspapers are full of advice, from columnists and reporters alike, who tell us which new and improved methods will work best with our children.

But in the end, the most effective parenting skills are not anything new – because children, no matter how much the world changes, are still more or less the same as they have always been… and rather than develop skills at parenting our children, the true aim is to teach skills to the children themselves.

One of the earliest skills our children should develop is the ability to read social situations. This can be made into a game; magazines, newspapers, and television shows can be used to teach children when people look happy or sad, tired or angry.

As children grow, failure to read social situations can lead to difficulty in getting along with others, or – worse – to hanging around with “the wrong crowd.” Our collections of effective parenting skills need to include this practice, of teaching our children to read others’ emotions.

The second step from this position is to educate our children on reading their own emotional states, and controlling their responses – to choose a response that is not merely the easiest or most instinctive, but one that will be effective. Parenting skills that focus on simply calling emotions “bad” or “negative” do little to help with this; the correct and proper behavior needs to be encouraged.

Building on this foundation, as children become older, they’ll need to understand problem solving techniques to make their own decisions. Effective parenting skills are measured not by how well they control the child’s behavior, but how well they educate that child in the skills necessary to enter adulthood.

While teenage angst has become a cottage industry in and of itself, from the “emo” movement to the “goth” and “punk” subcultures, most true dissatisfaction with teenage life comes from a lack of problem solving skills – and teaching them is one of the more effective parenting skills you can develop.

Once you’ve developed the effective parenting skills that can teach your child to read social situations, understand their own emotional states, and solve their own problems… parenting rapidly becomes a joy, rather than a chore. Children are remarkably good at, well, being good – if they have the skills to deal with the world around them.

Children have honestly not changed much over the last several centuries. For all the discussion of effective parenting skills in the new millennium, the children are ultimately still the same… and will probably be the same for generations to come.

To learn more about effective parenting skills I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

One of the most difficult parts of being a parent is needing to discipline your child. The standard discipline techniques we remember from our own childhood may no longer be applicable; many of us might remember heavy doses of corporal punishment, which is no longer an accepted form of discipline in the modern world.

This leaves many of us in limbo when it comes to discipline techniques, since we have very few examples of discipline that are both acceptable and well understood. In addition, every child is different, and the discipline techniques that work with one child may not work at all on another.

The question we need to ask ourselves, as parents, is what exactly we mean by discipline; techniques that merely punish improper behavior may not really create what we want, but teach the child how not to get caught… or, worse, not to do anything at all.

The cornerstone of discipline is to understand the consequences of our actions. To think not only about what we are going to do, but about what will happen when we do it. Effective discipline techniques will take this into account, and encourage proper behavior rather than simply discouraging improper behavior.

The overall strategy of any discipline techniques you may use, then, should be to identify proper behavior – not by the process of elimination, through punishment for improper behavior and a lack of action for proper behavior, but by specific positive reinforcement of proper behavior.

One of the most important elements of this is what James Lehman calls “thinking errors.” Children do not misbehave because they want to misbehave, but because they think the misbehavior is proper behavior – and correcting these errors in thinking isn’t simply a matter of saying what is wrong, but identifying what is right.

One of the more useful discipline techniques for this is to respond to misbehavior not with a question about how the child is feeling, or what the child is thinking, but instead what was happening. The critical element of thinking error is that the child believes that the perception is the truth; when you ask what the child is feeling or thinking, this implies that what the child feels or thinks is not the truth.

By asking what was happening, you encourage the child to explain what he or she was thinking and feeling, not from the perspective that something is wrong – but from the assumption that this is the truth.

Discipline techniques such as this approach the question without looking like a challenge, and literally prevent the child from becoming defensive. Without the defensive response, you can have a conversation instead of an argument, and more productive gains can be made.

When the problem of a misbehaving child is approached with the type of discipline techniques that anticipate and prevent the unproductive results that cause arguments, proper discipline becomes much easier to achieve and maintain – because more energy is invested in promoting appropriate choices, and less energy is wasted on defending inappropriate choices.

To learn more about discipline techniques I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.