If you're new here you might want to check out our top recommendation for parents. You can get a copy of The Total Transformation Program for free for a limited time, and it truly is a fantastic resource.

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.

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