Archive for 'Child Discipline'

No Means No: How to Teach Your Child That You Mean Business

by James Lehman, MSW

No Means No: How to Teach Your Child That You Mean Business I think a lot of parents feel it’s important to explain their reasoning to their children in an attempt to get them to understand. Realize that along the way, wanting your child to understand can easily shift into wanting their approval, or their acceptance of your reasons. When this happens, parents can get stuck in a dynamic where they’re over-explaining things to their children. I personally think that once you’ve given your child a reasonable amount of input, any further explanation defeats the purpose.

Have you fallen into the habit of over-explaining and over-negotiating with your kids? If so, it’s likely that every time your child wants to challenge your authority, decision, or rule, you keep talking to him in order to get him to understand why you’ve made the rule in the first place. And often as your child gets older, you’ll find yourself compromising some more and changing the rules a little more. Understand that what you’re really doing is training your child not to accept the rules. Don’t forget, if you tell your child “No, you can’t do that now,” and he keeps bugging you—and then you end up giving in and letting him do it—you’ve just trained him not to listen to you.

If your child is pushing back when you say no, understand that up until now, you’ve watered and fed that behavior, and it grew.

Let’s look at the reverse. If you wanted to train your child how to not accept no for an answer, how would you do it? First, when you said “no,” you’d encourage your child to keep challenging your authority, the consequences they’ve been given, or the responsibilities they have. You would also keep explaining your reasons to your child over and over. Then at some point, you’d give in and reward him with a bit (or all) of what he’s asking for. So you can see that many parents are training their children to challenge them without even knowing it.

So what should you do when you set limits and your child gets angry? I think it’s important to define what setting limits means: in my opinion, it could mean anything from establishing a curfew, to saying the “TV goes off at eight o’clock.” In effect, your child experiences those limits as being told “no.” Some kids get angry when they’re told no, and they manage that anger by demanding an explanation from their parents. They might say, “It’s not fair,” and start to act up—they take it out on you.

Things can often escalate into a shouting match. If you’re screaming at your child (and by the way I understand how easily that can happen) as far as he’s concerned, you’re on the same level as he is. You negate your own authority by yelling. Certainly, the first time you yell, your child might respond the way you want him to—and maybe even the second time. In fact, the first ten times he might respond. But the day is going to come where he just screams back at you. This keeps escalating until he breaks something or kicks the wall. In my opinion, getting into a shouting match usually doesn’t work, because your child just learns more aggressive ways to respond to you.

If a parent tells me their child won’t take “no” for an answer, my response to them is always, “If you reward that kind of behavior, then your “no” doesn’t really mean “no.” It means “keep trying.”

Establish Your Authority Early On
How can you stop all the over-negotiating and over-explaining as a parent, and let your child know that you mean what you say? The longer that you put that off, the harder it’s going to get. Parents have to establish their authority very early in life by setting limits and having a structure. For example, you don’t let your two-year-old walk by the street; you don’t let your three-year-old go out by the pool. You just have those limits and enforce them. This establishes the structure you will use as a parent for the rest of their childhood.

When Kids Get Over-Stimulated
Don’t forget, sometimes kids get over-stimulated and when that happens, it’s very hard for them to respond to a direction. And so parents have to keep that in mind. If kids are over stimulated and get carried away, take them to their room and have a little seat where they can sit, have them take a break for five minutes. That will allow them to recover from the over-stimulation. Then you can talk with them simply and firmly about what the boundaries are. And ask them if they can do it. If they can, then they can go out of the room. If they can’t, then they have to stay in for a few more minutes, until they agree to comply. If your child gets over-stimulated in a store, you can do the same thing by using your car as the calm down area.

Don’t Let them Turn You Around
I believe the best thing you can do when your child is arguing with your rules or consequence is to say “No, I’m not going to discuss this any further” and turn around and walk away. Don’t respond to any backtalk. So if you say no and your child starts saying, “But, but, but…” just keep walking. Leave him holding the bag. If you give him the power to turn you back around, he’s going to turn you back around forever. I think kids do need a reasonable amount of explanation, but after you’ve done that, you don’t owe them anything more. It’s not productive.

Tell Your Child the New Rules
The time to explain concepts to your child is when things are going smoothly. So when things are good, sit down and say to your child, “When I tell you ‘no,’ I don’t want to talk to you anymore about that. No means no.” You can help coach them if the word no is particularly frustrating to your child. “If you don’t like no, if that makes you frustrated, go to your room and draw for five minutes. Go do something to calm yourself down.” That should start very early. Let me be clear: If you give in to temper tantrums from kids who are two and three and four years old, you’re training them to challenge your authority. You’re training them not to give in to you, because they know you’ll give in to them. They’ll use the same tactics whenever you challenge them. And remember, if it works in childhood, they’ll use it as adults and it will lead to a lot of difficulty in their relationships.

Always Remember These 3 Parenting Roles: Teacher, Coach and Limit Setter
Always remember these three roles of parenting: the Teaching Role, the Coaching Role and the Limit Setting Role. The Limit Setting Role is an important part of your parenting style. Parents will often tell me they don’t like to set limits; these are the same parents who tell me they want to be friends with their kids. I understand that, and I’m not judging them. But I also think that that’s a misconception of what the parent-child relationship should be and can be in the early years—and even on into the teen years. My son didn’t need friends. He needed a parent to say, “No, you can’t stay out after ten o’clock on Friday night unless I know where you’re going to be.” Personally, I think the parent-child relationship is lifelong and complex. If your child is going to be friends with you, that probably won’t happen until they’re adults.

By the way, even though I don’t advocate being your child’s friend, I think you should be friendly with your kids at all times. That’s that “positive regard” I often mention. And what that means is that you should always talk to your kids like you like them. Have a look on your face and a tone that gives them the message that you care about them. I know this can be hard, especially when you’re frustrated and your child has been acting like a pill. Still, it’s very important to be positive when dealing with them as much as you can, because they pick up on any negative feelings very, very quickly and soon internalize them–or rebel against them aggressively.

Parents have to be clear and honest with themselves about the reality of the situation if they have nurtured this “never take no for an answer” problem in their kids. If your child is pushing back when you say no, understand that up until now, you’ve watered and fed that behavior, and it grew. So to expect this behavior to change without any conflict is unrealistic. I believe you need to set limits and stick to them, while remembering that your child is not going to turn around their behavior in one day. If you’re only starting when he’s 15, remember that you’ve trained your child that you’re a pushover and that you don’t mean what you say. Once you inadvertently train your kids to believe that, it’s very hard to break that training.

These are hard patterns to turn around, but parents can do it. You have to come up with a game plan. That game plan should include what you’re going to do, how you want your child to act in any given situation, how to teach them to do it, how to respond to them if they get so overwhelmed they can’t do it, and how to set limits on that behavior. In my opinion, these are some of the basics of sound parenting.

Realize that this fight might take you six months or six years. But unless your child has some severe behavioral disorder, eventually most kids will turn around and start responding–that’s all there is to it.

No Means No: How to Teach Your Child That You Mean Business reprinted with permission from Empowering Parents. For more information, visit www.empoweringparents.com

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.

The Truth About Behavior Modification Schools

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When you’ve had difficulty with your child, whether it’s trouble at school or destructive behavior at home, sooner or later someone gets around to recommending a behavior modification school. And while it’s true that these facilities have a solid track record for addressing behavior problems, there are simple facts that cannot be ignored.

The goal of a behavior modification school is simply to modify the behavior. That is the end of their interest, in most cases. They are not interested in making your child a healthy and productive adult; they are interested simply in getting your child to follow their rules.

Those rules aren’t constructed for the best interest of society, but for the best interest of the school – making it easier to run the school, and manage a large number of children with a small number of staff.

The purpose of a behavior modification school is, initially, a noble one: to help parents with their problem children. The trouble with these schools is that they don’t have any vested interest in the future success and happiness of your children.

If you’re considering a behavior modification school, it’s probably because you recognize that it’s a full time job to handle your one child. Imagine having sixty or more of them. NO level of expertise or education can make that easy.

Over time, the focus of the school changes from efficiency in results to efficiency in operation, and the children are treated less like the individuals they are – simply because there are not enough staff to handle the workload.

While this may do a reasonable job of preparing your child for a life in unskilled menial labor, perhaps at a fast food restaurant, it doesn’t do a very good job of preparing a child for future success… whether in college, or in business.

For a more balanced approach to modifying your child’s behavior, it’s worth the time to check into various systems like James Lehman’s, which provide you the tools to manage your child’s behavior at home.

With your involvement, you can be sure that your child’s education and training are in line with your values and ideals. Instead of letting other people raise your child with the priorities that matter to them, in an environment that doesn’t match the real world where the rest of us live, you can ensure that your child is given the skills and behaviors that really matter – the skills that can make them healthy and productive members of our modern society.

Overall, the results you’ll find with a program you can implement at home are well worth the extra time and effort you put into it.

Parents – before you send you kid away, do something that will teach you skills as well as help your child. I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

Secret Parenting Techniques of Child Care Professionals

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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.

Designing a Childhood Discipline Program

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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.

Teaching Your Child Discipline

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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.

Dealing With ODD Effectively

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Most parents have enough to handle with their children, even when there’s nothing more than the usual childhood behavior. But when your child has oppositional defiance disorder (ODD), the usual parenting techniques and patterns seem counterproductive – dealing with ODD can be a stressful and confusing task. To handle it effectively, it seems like you have to work a lot harder and longer to achieve half the success of other parents.

The major problem most parents of ODD children face isn’t so much the opposition itself, but the nature of the children they’re dealing with. ODD goes beyond the usual “problem with authority” every child displays to some degree, and comes primarily from a deep-seated need for the child to be in control. The parent, in many cases, feels out of control… as though the child simply cannot behave.

Underneath the defiance, however, there is the same battle all children fight: the battle for self-determination and independence. Every child wants to be in control, and dealing with ODD becomes much simpler when you understand why the child is being defiant in the first place… because defiance works. It places the child in control, and frustrates any and all efforts by the parent (or other authority figure) to be in control.

When dealing with ODD in your own children, or other people’s children if you are a caregiver or other professional, there is a simple understanding that makes all the difference. All you must do is understand why the child is defiant, and address the needs for that defiance in another fashion.

Children are defiant when they feel out of control. Once they understand that they do have control, and are capable of making choices that affect their own lives, dealing with ODD is not as difficult; the child learns, over time, to make those choices intelligently and correctly.

Even when you’re not dealing with ODD in your child, the same processes can improve discipline in children simply because these desires and impulses – while exaggerated in the ODD child – are universal. Every child wants to make choices that are productive and helpful in achieving their goals, but the difficulty is in identifying which behaviors achieve goals in the long term; not just at the moment.

For parents that feel a little lost without guidance, many programs exist which offer help in dealing with ODD or other discipline issues in children. Newer programs offer novelty; older programs offer time-tested techniques. Some programs, such as James Lehman’s, fall in between the two… being both time-tested, and based on recent understandings of how the childhood mind works.

Dealing with ODD is not an impossible task, nor is it particularly difficult – once you understand the goals of the child and how to help accomplish them. By moving from being the other team (which must be defeated) to being on the same team, working with the child to achieve the same goal, dealing with ODD can actually become a natural and normal process that requires little effort.

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

Child Discipline Methods That Really Work

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When dealing with a misbehaving child, one of the first things parents learn is that it’s difficult to find working child discipline methods. The methods that we may recall from our own childhood simply don’t mean the same thing to our own children; after all, every child is different, and where one child may be terrified at the prospect of a parent’s disapproval, another may simply not show much interest in avoiding discipline at all.

One of the most unproductive mindsets, one that has wormed its way into the cracks of our culture from every direction, is that punishment is the end-all and be-all of consequences. Discipline is not about forcing your children to suffer, so they will avoid the behavior that preceded their suffering; this is never an effective method.

What truly instills discipline is the understanding that the child is in control of what happens… and that any consequence is a direct result of the child’s own actions. A major part of this is to keep the consequences simple, and tie them to accountability. Child discipline methods that involve accountability are more often successful.

In the end, what your child needs is not some emotional aversion to certain behaviors because Bad Things happened when he did them before. You simply can’t make enough Bad Things happen; you’ll never catch every misbehavior, and you’ll just end up teaching the skill of “not getting caught.”

What your child needs is the appropriate social and intellectual skills that enable him or her to identify what makes a behavior proper or improper, and choose the proper behavior because it signifies his or her degree of skill. This is what discipline really is – the conviction and desire to do the right thing, the proper thing, even if it is inconvenient.

In James Lehman’s popular Total Transformation Method, he recommends a system of simple consequences that foster a sense of accountability – and, with it, responsibility. Children do not learn from what their parent says, but from what their parent does… and the Total Transformation Method focuses on real actions, rather than empty words.

When your words explain that you’re teaching responsibility by putting your child in a chair, while you clean up the mess left behind yourself, and your child simply sits and waits… your actions don’t teach responsibility. Rather the opposite.

An action-based consequence would be having the child clean up the mess himself or herself, as a direct result of having made it. It is clear to the child that there would be no mess to clean up if one were not made, and the correct behavior is encouraged.

If you enjoyed this article on child discipline methods you’re likely to enjoy what James Lehman has to teach you in his system, The Total Transformation Program.

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