When Small Fry first started to exhibit tantruming behavior many months ago, something neither of her older brothers ever did much of, it set in motion for me a renewed interest in discipline. After all, it had been a whole year since Prince Charming and I had occastion to sit down and decide how we were going to deal with pre two year old behaviors.
This time, it was girly tantrums and an amazingly strong attitude to go with them.
I really enjoy reading, thinking and talking about parenting. Sometimes, though, trying to decipher a best practice for disciplining children is no easy task. In fact, it’s oftentimes entirely impossible to do what is absolutely best. Prince Charming and I have come to learn that just as children are fluid, so parenting is an ever evolving experience. So what is best at one moment, may not be at another. Just as what works for one child, may not for another, even within the same family.
So, when I was asked back when I posted about Small Fry’s Target tantrum and subsequently mentioned that we were working with her on obedience and controlling her emotions about what I thought about toddler discipline, I hesitated. Simply because my husband and I have four children doesn’t make me a discipline expert. I wing it pretty often. Plus, there simply isn’t a right or a wrong way to discipline. I wasn’t sure exactly how to approach a discipline post.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that parents can learn a lot from each other, even if there is no best practice. Indeed, I have found myself inspired by other parents’ ideas and get support by connecting with them and hearing how they handle discipline. Whether it be at church, MOPS, on my blog or community, in my neighborhood or local parks, I love connecting with other mothers. With that being said, I’d love to share with you today what discipline beliefs our family currently has. What works for our family may be what works for your family. Or it may not. Or it may get you thinking. But what I am really hoping is that some of you may be interested in sharing your own discipline ideas in some discussions that I hope follow this post.
I literally spent a good chunk of time thinking about what it is I have come to believe about discipline after Small Fry’s Target debacle. I’ve been mulling things over ever since, as I’ve been implementing new ideas with our kids as well as sticking by our tried and true techniques. I’ve gleaned things I learned during the nearly six years I spent, before having children of my own, teaching elementary school, too. By blending together what has worked for us with all of our children so far, I came up with some discipline concepts that have come to mean a lot to our family. I hope they inspire and encourage you!
Avoid the situations and stimulations that trigger poor behavior.
Our MSC* make it painfully obvious to us that when they are over-tired, they do not behave well.
*Many Small Children
Not only is Small Fry no exception to that rule, she actually embodies that rule. I thought it would serve me well to take her to Target that fateful day near naptime. Wrong. In an I shoulda known better moment, I learned that one of the best ways to deal with poor behavior is to avoid it in the first place. So now it’s simple: to avoid tantrums, I avoid letting Small Fry get overtired. When, for the most part, it’s rest time or bedtime, no matter how much I need to get done, I take her home and put her to bed.
The same may apply to your children when they get too hungry, overstimulated or run with the wrong crowd. By learning what triggers poor behavior in our children, we have learned that we can avoid some of it in the first place.
Make expectations clear.
It has seemed to me that our children behave better, especially in public, when I make my age-appropriate expectations for them crystal clear. For example, we review our behavior rules for the Community Center each time before we get out of the car to play there. The same goes for what I expect of them as we shop. My one finger rule has bought me so much sanity over the years. Because all of our children don’t always fit neatly in one shopping cart, and because I want them to learn at an early age how to obey and walk close to me in public, I employ this technique, one I’ve blogged about before, often.
When using the one finger rule, our children are allowed to touch almost anything they want when we are out and about, shopping or whatever. But just with one finger. It’s not “Don’t touch!” Instead, it’s “You may touch that bag of cookies on the shelf with one finger, MckNugget.” It really works! They get to act on their curiosity, get to see what things feel like, don’t feel suppressed, all while not leaving me with high blood pressure and the unwanted job of re-stocking the shelves!
Focus on what you’d like your child to do instead of on what you do not want them not to.
Just like we as adults typically respond better to positive speech than we do when someone approaches us when taking a negative spin on things, the same has seemed to be true for our children. I usually get a better response from our MSC when I kindly let them know what I would like from them. So, my response becomes, “My ears will listen when they hear nice talking,” instead of “Quit whining!” It’s “Why don’t you try patting baby Stellan on the tummy?” and not “Take your gosh darn finger out of his rectum!”
Or something like that.
Give choices so your child has some reasonable measure of control over their life.
I took a seminar back when I was a teacher about classroom management. I remember learning how little control adults often give children over their own lives and how that can often be frustrating for children. It made sense to me. Of course, please don’t get me wrong, I understand that children are just that and that parents are to be the authorities over them. They are to obey us and we are to train them in the ways they should go. But to that end, I have indeed found that giving choices to our children works a whole lot better to get the desired results than just making demands right and left. Indeed, our goal as parents is to train our children to become self sufficient adults who can make their own wise decisions. It behooves us as parents to give our children chances to exercise that, in my opinion.
So, when Big Mac is dilly dallying and not putting on his shoes like I ask, our interaction might go something like this:
Me: “Sweetheart, we need to leave. Please find some shoes and put them on.”
Big Mac: “But I can’t find my blue shoes.”
Me: “Well, then you will have to pick a different pair.”
Big Mac: “But Maaaama, I want to wear my blue shoes! I’m gonna go in my closet and look for them.”
Me: “Nope, we don’t have time for that. You’re going to have to pick another pair.”
Big Mac: “No, no, no!!!! I want my blue ones!”
Me: “Big Mac, listen to me. You may either pick a different pair out of the shoe bin or I will pick one for you. Please make your choice now.”
And he’ll either pick a new pair, or I will and we’ll move on. Hopefully with no screaming on the part of either party.
These techniques I’ve just discussed all help our family to sometimes avoid bad behavior and great difficulties. When I don’t freak out and instead choose to use them, I mean! But trouble does come, of course, and our children are no exception.
When a situation does go awry, I find I need to be prepared with an appropriate arsenal of what to do. And believe you me, situations go awry plenty around our house. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may remember MckNugget’s dying llama fits that he’d throw when he couldn’t get his way. Big Mac has had his moments, too, remember? So when things head south, I find that I need to be armed and ready to steer them back north again.
Act quickly.
Immediate response to one of our children’s misbehavior almost always helps things turn around quicker than a delayed response does. That sometimes means finding an off-ramp and having a chat in a parking lot or leaving a restaurant to discuss in the bathroom. No matter what response I’m going to give, giving it quickly usually helps. Unless of course, I am practicing extinction, a discipline technique I blogged about here.
Act calmly.
Of all the tricks I’ve learned in my four and a half years of parenting, staying calm is probably the simplest yet most effective tool I’ve happened upon. I liken it to my experience with natural childbirth. What we learned in our Bradley childbirth class about staying calm and peaceful even as the pain of labor mounted. Indeed, Prince Charming said to me after Big Mac was born that the time when I was transitioning to being fully dilated and getting ready to push looked like it was the “easiest” for me. It was hard not to snort milk out my nose when he told me that. Indeed, it was during transition that I actually thought I was going to perish. But I stayed quiet and calm and that helped me deal with that experience.
In a similar way, I try to deal with the stresses of Many Small Children like that, too. The rougher things get in the house, say from between 4 and 6 pm each day, the time I lovingly refer to as everyone’s witching hour, the calmer I try to force myself to become. I don’t always succeed, but I do focus as much as I can on being a calm mother most of the time. When I am tempted, at the end of a long day, to scream at the top of my lungs, “Be quiet, leave me alone! Give me some bleeping peace and quiet for one cotton pickin’ moment!” I determine to be as calm as ever. “Wow, darling, that’s too bad that you just shattered my glass vase on accident. I guess I’ll just clean it up. Would you pretty please put down that butcher knife and kindly give me a hand while working on bringing your sweet as honey voice down a decibel or two? Thanks!”
Or something like that. You get the idea.
Get on their eye level.
Just as comments yelled from a backseat driver can grate, so I imagine it is for children when we holler to them from the other room. “Small Fry! I hear you tormenting your brothers in the other room. You’d better knock it off!” doesn’t go over as well as it does when I get up off the chair, enter the room, kneel down next to our little, ahem, angel and look her in the eyes, saying, “Small Fry, do you think it is kind to tease Nuggey like that? Would you please show me how you can be kind to your brother instead?” I’m not sure about you, but we rarely have luck in our family with armchair parenting.
Distract.
Sometimes, if the issue is not severe, a simple, “Hey, Nuggey, let’s go out on the deck and look for birds!” is all it takes to turn the tides of his bad behavior without even having to get into any kind of punishment.
Model for your children how to verbalize their emotions.
Small Fry is just beginning to be very verbal. I try very hard to remember that she learns what she lives. Instead of storming around the house when I’m angry, I have noticed that it helps our children when Prince Charming and I model to them how to verbalize emotions. “I’m feeling frustrated because the yogurt got splattered all over the ceiling. I’m going to go take a little break.”
Also, at times when Small Fry is working hard to share what she’s feeling, but is falling flat on her little toddler face, I try to work through her feelings with her. When she screams out, “No, no, my phone!!” I will sometimes respond, “Well, Small Fry, it’s actually Mama’s phone.” When another “No, my phone!” is followed by a wail and a screech, perhaps I’ll say, “If you’re feeling sad, Sweetheart, you can say, ‘I’m sad because you won’t let me play with your phone.’” What follows is just some toddler babble, but it’s a step in the learning process, I think.
Be consistent.
Probably most of us have experienced that anything worth doing works better when done consistently. It goes, therefore, without saying that in our family, we get more consistent results from our children when we are consistent with our expectations and their discipline.
Know and use your child’s currency.
Finally, an idea I ran across a few years back was to try to understand your child’s currency. I have found that learning what motivates each of our children helps us tailor our discipline techniques to that particular child. Big Mac is motivated by wanting to please us, his parents, whereas the fear of consequences drives Nuggey. As we’ve learned what makes each of our children tick, we can tailor our motivations and punishments accordingly. Some of your children may respond well to a spanking when they are blatantly defiant, while another might just need a hand slap and yet another simply needs alone time in his bedroom for fifteen minutes. It has worked for our family to find what techniques fall within our family value system and which ones work for each of our children.
There are as many ways to discipline a child as there are types of children. In my four short years of parenting, which have sometimes seemed rather, ahem, long, I’ve come to understand that parenting goes best for me when I stay flexible, teachable, go with the flow, and am not afraid to throw away old techniques in favor of new ones. I also have had to learn to forgive myself for when I fail at mothering the way I know I should or for when I lose my cool with our children. Know that many times, no matter how many of your best laid plans you put into place, parenting is simply a fly by the seat of your pants endeavor.
At least that’s been my experience.
What do you think of the discipline ideas I’ve shared? What works in your family? Are there areas you have strengths in but others where you need a fresh outlook? That’s certainly how it is for me. Feel free to share your own discipline ideas with me and with each other in the comments on this post. I’ve also started a thread in my BlogFrog community about discipline specific to toddlers. I invite you to join in with some of the discussions and be inspired by each other!
