If you’ve read my blog for some time, it likely comes as no surprise to you that I take a bit more of a Laissez Faire approach when it comes to political topics like how involved our government should be in our lives. No, rest assured, this is not another post about government. I am quite happy with how I’ve covered my thoughts in these posts.

Instead, I’m writing tonight about the Laissez Faire approach I have chosen to take with my parenting and how counter cultural that mindset seems to be these days.

The political climate today. The parenting climate today. It’s the old chicken or the egg thing as to which of the two came first. I really won’t even wager a guess, because I have no idea. Yet there seem to me to be striking correlations between the government that the majority in our nation seem to want these days, what some would deem a nanny state, and the style of parenting I see plenty of in the public square.

Have any of you noticed a trend towards more and more protection of our children? I have. So much, if not all, of what I see in today’s parenting climate is well meaning. Under the very wonderful umbrella of wanting to protect our children from predators, physical injury, hurt feelings and sunburn, protective beliefs abound. With a heartfelt desire to protect our little ones, parents have bought into so many ideas. And many of them rightly so. Children should be protected from the sun or wear sunblock. They must be in five-point harnesses in the car. Children under age 1 should never be given honey. Breastfed babies don’t usually get enough Vitamin D, so supplements are recommended. Helmets should be worn whenever a child is on a bicycle. Trampolines are safer when surrounded by a net.

There are numerous safety conscious rules and suggestions that weren’t around when we were little, let alone when our parents were growing up. And I’m far from saying that such ideas should be shunned across the board. In fact, I follow almost (ahem) all of the recommended practices above. As I said, these well meaning parenting ideals are there for our children’s protection. And who doesn’t want our children to be protected? I know I certainly do.

It’s just that I think, and here I am finally getting to my main point, this trend towards helicopter parenting, with moms and dads hovering about their children watching their every move and checklisting them for safety, is getting slightly out of hand.

And, as things in the parenting sector move more dramatically towards protecting our children, the irony I find is that we are sometimes actually hurting our children more.

When I first began to parent the way I do, I did it just because that was what seemed natural to me. And the more children my husband and I have had, the more deliberate I have become about those same parenting ideals. Letting kids be kids since 2004. That’s our mantra. It’s just that, until the recent past, I didn’t realize how rather counter cultural my beliefs are in the parenting climate’s increasing nanny state status. The more I am around other parents, the more I read, the more I blog and get feedback from readers, the more I realize that while there are plenty of people who feel the same way as I do, there are many who don’t.

And, as I’ve blogged about before, good parenting is not about keeping up with the Jones’, or mothering your children the way your neighbor does. If you know me, you’ll know I don’t buy into the whole let’s all parent the same way and make mothers who do things differently from us feel bad thing. Blech. Good parenting is about knowing your children, being close enough to them to feel the pulse of what they have going on, so you can make the best choices for them.

There is a fine line I draw between thinking everyone should parent the way I do (I don’t…except that I think you should parent the way you know is best for your children regardless of what others think) and between wanting you guys to know that I think the way parenting today is trending is not the best for any of our children.

A commenter on my last post, with a Ph.D. in Child Development, made some amazing points. These are things I’ve always innately felt, but had no real proof of. Until I read her comment and did a little research myself. Turns out that, even according to child development studies, what she shares is spot on. “If you take away the child’s ability to naturally explore jumping, climbing, space, their body’s response to impact and how to adjust the way their body needs to land on impact, then you are not promoting their natural development. In fact, you are hindering their innate physical development. The emotional component of development also needs the opportunity to explore how to take risks and gain confidence. Kids are made (and for natural development, required) to spin, jump, and most importantly fall…The more you restrict a child’s natural need to take risks, the more they will seek out even more risky behavior. For example, if all they hear is “no jumping off the couch”, “no jumping off the playground structure,” “no jumping off the table” etc., etc., they are only going to be forced to search out something they can jump off of when you aren’t looking and there to make sure they are safe.”

And, I have no tangible evidence to support my next statement, but I simply have this feeling that by holding our children back from experiencing life because we as parents have become germophobic, we are also doing them no favors. “Don’t eat that, it fell on the floor!” “Don’t touch that lizard, it’s filthy!” ” By overly protecting our children from germs, I have to wonder if we are actually helping to make them less resistant to illness, thus making them more likely to get sick instead of less. In fact, this is exactly part of the issue I take with some recommended childhood vaccines. But that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax.

Of course, there are children who have contracted salmonella after handling a toad and forgetting to wash their hands…men who smoked a pack a day their whole lives and live longer than all their friends. But I don’t think that living our lives based on the statistical outliers on either end is the way to go. What if, just for the fun of it, parents looked at actual statistics about the safety of their children? I did just that today, and what I found was fascinating, affirming and inspiring.

Journalist Carol Midgley posed the following question, with stats to back up the answer. “All you anxious parents out there who are busy wrapping your children in cotton wool this summer the better to protect them from the predatory pedophiles inevitably lurking behind every…hedge: Let’s just suppose, in some sick parallel universe, that you wanted your children to be abducted. Let’s imagine that you’d had enough of them and decided that your cunning plan was to chuck them out of the house then sit back and wait for some passing kid-snatcher to run off with them. How long do you think you’d have to wait?” The answer? It would take 200,000 years. In any given year, an average child has a 0.0005% chance of being abducted by a stranger.

Warwick Cairns is an author who wrote the book How to Live Dangerously: Why We Should All Stop Worrying and Start Living. The book speaks to my heart. And to my fascination with statistics and numbers. The book “also concludes that if you really want to be safe, you ought to put yourself in more danger.”

Turns out, my husband and I have been doing that with our children all along!

You see, friends, photographs of our children on wet trampolines or jumping from hay bale to hay bale aren’t meant to cause blog controversy. Sometimes they do, but I post them because this is our life. And, in words and pictures, I long to show others how freeing and empowering it can be both for parents and children alike to not hover so closely. To protect our children from natural consequences that can serve to teach them valuable lessons is to do them a disservice, I believe.

In his book Paranoid Parenting, sociologist Professor Frank Furedi points out the irony in overprotective parenting as well. “Three children a day, for instance, are injured in the home from burns or smoke inhalation, and one dies every ten days.” Yet more children than ever are being kept indoors to protect them from being abducted. The irony? There is a .0005% chance a child will be abducted by a stranger, yet one child is burnt to death every ten days after an accident in the home.

And these statistics back up the way I’ve long felt. I’m not going to fall prey to fears when they are not logical or even likely to happen. I am going to live my life to the fullest and teach our children to do the same thing.

I’ve even, gasp, left my children buckled in the car while I run in to return a movie or whatnot. I think that, although the unthinkable could happen, they’re probably safer there than all crossing the parking lot with me twice.

It’s not that I don’t fear awful things like kidnapping happening to our children. I do. I watch them like a hawk when they bathe, especially since we have more children now because drowning freaks me out. But I also know that some of my fears are irrational, like my fear of flying, proved more irrational than even I knew by Cairns’ book in which he shares that I’d have to fly in an airplane every single day for 26,000 years before I would statistically die in a crash, while “in the same period [I'd] have been killed 20 times driving to the airport.” I do still fear these things, sometimes often. But herein lies the difference between me and some other parents: I refuse, absolutely refuse, to let those fears rule me or my children’s lives.

There are risks that my husband and I do worry about and take very seriously. It’s just that not touching snakes and never jumping out of trees aren’t going to make the cut of risk lowering restrictions we are going to impose on our children.

Besides, we happen to think that by living dangerously, our children are actually safer.

Well, we think that and that this world is not the ultimate end, anyway. While I don’t want one of my children to leave my arms and meet Jesus just yet if I had my choice, I’m thankful that I know a God with Whom any of us can spend eternity whenever we do leave this earth, no matter how we die.

Oh, that was, literarily speaking, the poorest conclusion to a post I’ve ever written. But I had to say it!

And now I’m done.

Oh, man, I just can’t find a way to end this post!!

Somebody help me! It’s after midnight and I should not be writing this late because I just get slap happy and that’s what’s happening to me!!

Sigh.

It had been quite some time since seedlings had begun to emerge in our straw bales. So long, in fact, that even my embarassingly untrained eye could already begin to determine what was what. Pumpkin vines are already spilling out of the side of one bale. Heads of lettuce looking lush in another. Carrot tops appearing in a third. And then there’s the spicy bale. We have various hot peppers and radishes making themselves known in that one. The seed packets and advice from those with thumbs greener than mine both had one thing to say about this time in our garden’s life: It was time to thin. That’s right. Pull out and toss aside perfectly good plants in order to make room for the rest to grow fully.

So today, I finally made myself do it.

Why exactly do I say made myself? Well, I love our little garden. It’s adorable and it’s awesome and it’s growing so well and it’s…ours. We take pride in it. The fact that full on plants are growing out of seeds that we planted in damp, fertilized straw is thrilling. We take ownership of our little garden. After all, it’s us who are helping to keep it watered, making sure it is safe from animals who might nibble at its bounty and fed with a balance of nutrients. So that is exactly why it was hard for me to thin out the plants.

However, I knew I had to. In the name of a better and healthier garden, the seedlings must be spaced just so. There needs to be room for each carrot to thrive, space for the watermelon vines to wind, ample chance for each broccoli plant to flourish. And where too many little sprouts are clustered together, optimal growth simply can’t occur.

Therefore, for the benefit of our garden, I must thin out the plants. And I’m going to be honest with you. Plucking perfectly good, dainty little fresh plants was totally hard for me to do! Yanking a thriving green baby carrot from its warm home in the straw bale went against what felt right. Tossing hearty pumpkin vines, just beginning to fall off the side of the bale seemed to go against the very reason we were gardening: to grow things! Yet there I sat, my knees getting damp from the rain soaked lawn, black dirt collecting under my fingernails. I dutifully did the hard thing: I thinned out all of our vegetables. Discarding baby plants rubbed me the wrong way; it seemingly went against the plan I had for our garden.

But, difficult for me to do or not, it was what needed to be done.

I would have been doing my garden no favors by leaving all the tender sprouts in place, crowded together. If plants had feelings, I’m sure I would have hurt many of them today. The little radishes wouldn’t understand that they need to be sacrificed so that their neighbor can grow stronger. Thankfully, plants don’t have feelings. I went through the garden, row by row, and did what I knew I needed to do, paying no regard to the fact that I didn’t want to be doing it.

As I pulled, plucked and cast aside today, it occurred to me quite clearly that parenting is very much like gardening. Specifically in the area of our children’s behavior, we often must do the hard work of disciplining them, even when it’s difficult.

Well, of course, we don’t have to do this as parents. Just as I wouldn’t have had to thin out the plants in our garden. Children will still grow, vegetables will still emerge. But I firmly believe that without following through with the sometimes painful task of disciplining our children, they won’t thrive as well as they otherwise could.

Naturally, how different parents discipline is a personal choice. It differs from family to family and even from child to child. As it has in our family, beliefs about discipline may change as the years go on and more children, and more experience, enter our lives. My once firmly held beliefs about the appropriateness of spanking have been replaced with a gentler approach that includes physical punishment much less often. The bonded feeling I used to have when I believed I should never tell my child no gave way to the even stronger bond that exists when my children feel safe and secure knowing that there are boundaries and no-no’s out there. As I learn more about my children, I am better able to confidently discipline them. Using ways that speak their language, I can reach them with ways of shaping their behavior and self control.

Although there are as many ways to discipline a child as their are snowflakes that fall in the Frozen Tundra each winter, I don’t think that means that anything goes. Just as long as a parent means well does not necessarily mean that their discipline is appropriate. I don’t know what you have experienced out in the public square, among your circle of friends or with the other mothers at your child’s preschool, but what I have been feeling a lot of in the past few years is an I want to be my child’s friend vibe.

Ironically enough, I love the thought of being my children’s friend. Being intimately bonded with my babies from day one is a huge priority and joy for me as a mother. The majority of attached parenting ideals sit well with my soul. However, sometimes I choose to do the hard work of making choices in disciplining my children that are not fun at the time. Decisions that may not make the offending child feel exactly friendly towards me. Whether it be the removal of a prized toy for a season of time, practicing extinction in order to snuff out a certain behavior, giving a spanking or putting a child in a time-out or on “the naughty spot” as one television show describes it, there are things that some parents do that aren’t winning us any points in our children’s books right now.

And I have decided that, much like thinning the plants in our straw bale garden, I am okay with that.

Except I’m not. It pains me to have to discipline my children. I detest taking away a privilege or giving them another kind of consequence. But far be it from me to withhold such discipline and instead allow my children to become an overrun, crowded, unhealthy garden. Too often I think we as parents make the mistake of parenting solely based on feelings. Sure, feelings are very important. Many of my parenting actions are based on feelings and I consider myself bonded to and very emotionally close to my children. With that being said, I would be remiss to use emotion as the singular basis for my parenting. Sometimes, even though I want nothing more than to scoop a child up and give him a hug, I must choose to instead discipline him…and then hug him.

That is not to say that there aren’t many, many times when we choose to bestow grace and mercy upon our children. Just as God loves us in spite of our sin and forgives us, granting us salvation instead of sending us to eternal damnation like we deserve, sometimes we model that same act for our children. There are times when we don’t give the child the consequence they deserve, but instead tell them we choose to bestow mercy upon them. There is a beautiful book that I have read parts of called Grace Based Parenting that I learned a lot from.

However, my ultimate job as a parent is not to make sure my child is always happy. It is to teach my child to be content in all things. To be self controlled. To learn to make wise choices. To be able to fail and get back up again.

To that end, it often takes parents completing the difficult task of disciplining our children. Even when we don’t want to. Even when the voices of the world tell us we are being mean. Just like plucking perfectly good plants in a garden seems to go against the very purpose of the garden, we still must do it because we know it to be right and because it will help our garden in the long run. So I think it is with our children. To raise children into secure, healthy, capable adults, we must allow ourselves to be first their parents and second their friends. We need to trust our instincts as mothers and allow ourselves to discipline our children because we know it is right and because it will help them in the long run.

“All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwords it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” Hebrews 12:111.

Ah, the garden of parenthood. The work we do here may be hard, we might end up with dirt under our fingernails, but the bounty we will produce will be worth all of the difficult tasks we must complete.

I am no parenting pro. I’m just a parent. Learning as I go. However, in my five short years as a parent, I have done lots of learning about what works for us. This post is part and parcel of a couple other bits on discipline I’ve written in the past, with some updated video and twists thrown in. Hopefully it may inspire and encourage you as you walk along your own parenting journey!

When Small Fry first started to exhibit tantruming behavior before she even turned two, 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 occasion 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.

You do remember Small Fry’s Target tantrum, right?

Whew! That was an exhausting day; I remember it well. If I had it to do over again, I would probably handle the Target tantrum a little differently than I did that day, but I did what I could at the time. But even if I had it to do again, I am pretty sure I’d still employ extinction, which I’ll discuss during this post. But first, some of the other tips I’ve picked up during the past five years.

avoid the situations and stimulations that trigger poor behavior

Just as it’s light years easier to prevent contracting an illness than it is to treat the illness once we are sick, so it is with parenting. Finding ways to avoid negative behavior in our children is ever so much preferred to dealing with said behavior once it occurs.

For example, our MSC make it painfully obvious to us that when they are over-tired, they do not behave well.

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. Her tantrums, thankfully, became a thing of the past soon after they began. And that was in large part due to avoiding situations that cause her to tantrum and also by ignoring tantrums when she does have them.

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 your expectations clear

Much like I wrote in this post about riding in cars with boys, it is critical for parents to make their expectations clear to their children. 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

Creating a positive environment in the home is invaluable as we help our young ones learn to make good choices and follow directions. Just as we adults typically respond better to positive speech than we do when someone approaches us, 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 find a great place for that garbage?” and not “For Pete’s sake, don’t throw that on the kitchen floor!” And “We sit in our highchair when we are eating,” instead of “I told you, do not stand in your highchair!!!”

The positivity that flows from speaking to our children in ways that show them what we want them to do instead of pointing out their wrong behavior is sure to have a calming affect on your whole household. At least, that’s been our experience.

give choices so your child has some reasonable measure of control over his or her life

I took a seminar back when I was a teacher about classroom management. I remember learning about what little amount of 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. We believe that very strongly. Our four children 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. Yes, my husband and I have set it as one of our goals as parents 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 freedom, 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.

act quickly

Immediate response to the misbehavior of one of our children 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, I’ve learned that giving it quickly usually helps.

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. It really works to help keep my mood stable and does wonders for the attitudes of the children in our home, too.

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. I think our children deserve a little more respect than that, anyway.

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. This technique, I have found, works very well for young children who are not mature enough to grasp the real reason behind their behavior.

practice extinction

“Oh, I can’t believe you get out so much with all of your small children. They are so well behaved. And believe me, I see a lots of kids. It always brings a smile to my face when you four walk in.” Such beautiful compliments, like this one I got from the lady who runs the cafeteria at the community center we used to frequent before we moved make me feel so proud.

But don’t get me wrong: I am certain that, equally as often, people in public turn their heads away from my children when they are acting like hooligans, which they are certainly prone to do.

One technique I often employ with my children is extinction. I cannot exclusively fly by the seat of my pants when it comes to parenting. I have too many children and they are too young for me to risk just winging it. I am severely outnumbered and the numbers are not going to be in my favor anytime soon. Or, like, ever. Therefore, there are areas in which I must be deliberate. In which I must plan my course of attack when it comes to battles with my children.

And, in this example, I sometimes make a concerted effort to plan to ignore my children. You heard me right. Ignore. That’s what extinction means. I didn’t learn about this technique in any book on parenting; instead, when I studied education in college, I learned extinction as an classroom management technique.

Extinction is the deliberate ignoring of a behavior that you wish to eliminate in another.

Using extinction effectively takes a level of commitment to be sure. You can’t ignore for a while, and then when your child gets really, really, reeeeeally whiny, bend down to them and say, calmly, “You need to knock that off!” That would be, in fact, worse than never ignoring their behavior in the first place. Your child would learn, in that situation, that if the keep up long enough, and up the ante enough, you will eventually respond. They will win. This is most decidedly not the message that I want to send to my children!

Certainly, there are times when extinction is not called for and an urgent non-ignoring of a dangerous situation is in order. However, when used in the right situation, I have found this technique to be a life saver, if not at the moment, then for future outbursts.

To be sure, practicing extinction helps me to stay calm. On the other hand, to engage in a conversation about my child’s behavior is likely to elicit some kind of a defensive response from them. And going back and forth with a whole lotta “But, Mama”’s is not the way I want to spend my afternoons. Besides, doing so is likely to get me agitated. But to ignore some inappropriate behavior completely (especially when the child is not being destructive, hurtful, defiant, etc.), helps me keep my cool. And keep my arsenal full for a real battle.

Using extinction also helps children learn that they are not in control of another person’s behavior. Once I decide to ignore one of my children’s antics, I am in it for the long haul and I will continue to ignore it. By not giving in and offering the offending child my attention, I am teaching him that he cannot control me. And then next time the situation arises, the offending child is more likely to remember that their whines didn’t get them their desires last time, and they are less likely to try that route again.

Let’s take a look at how this has played out in my family recently. Say, last week, for example.

We were all in the car and the children and I had been talking. I was answering their questions and things were merry. At some point, whining began. “He’s looking at me!” “My legs are getting cold!” “She took my book!” I spent a few minutes working through each situation with them. “Then just look out the window so you can’t see him.” “Okay, I’ll turn the (now functional) air conditioning down.” “Then please ask her politely to give it back to you.”

When my verbal assistance fell on deaf ears and the whining continued, I calmly told all of the children that I was done talking to them for a while. We were a mere three minutes from home. “If you don’t like my ideas about how to work through these issues, that’s okay. But I am not going to talk about any of it any more. The way you are talking to me is not polite. Please try to work things out by yourselves. Do not talk to me again until we are home.”

Oh, boy.

Apparently, they saw fit to test my resolve to not talk about any of it any more. For the next minute or so, a minute which seemed like an eternity and I captured on “film” (didn’t know how to post it as only an audio recording, so pardon the fact that there is no video), they hollered my name and begged for my attention. See?

Mom!? from Jennifer McKinney on Vimeo.

Whew! That was exhausting. As bound and determined as I was to stick by what I said, I also know my children. By the time this “video” was winding down, they had clearly gotten the point and my ignoring them was bothering them. Not wanting them to be unduly upset and feeling like I had gotten my point across, I ended the extinction. We were almost home, but still we stopped the car so I could talk to them all.

“Do you children know why Mama was not answering you?”

“Because we didn’t listen an’ we were shoutin’ your name?”

“Yes. I tried to help you all, but you kept whining. So I told you I was done talking if you were going to whine. But it sounds like you’re all done hollering at me. Thank you! I’d love to talk now.”

“Oh, okay!”

And that was the end of that. Ahhh, extinction. Not always easy, but sometimes worth it in the long haul. For the record, no one has hollered my name in the car since that fateful day, and our children have remembered to speak to me nicely. Hopefully that trend will keep up!

model for your children how to verbalize their emotions

I try very hard to remember what I heard some number of years ago: Our children learn what they live. Instead of storming around the house when I’m angry, I have noticed that it helps our children when my husband 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, for example, Stellan is working hard to share what he’s feeling, but is falling flat on his little toddler face, I try to work through his feelings with her. When he screams out, “No, no, mine!” I will sometimes respond, “Well, Stellan, 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 of course just some toddler babble, but it’s a step in the learning process, I think. I follow it up with, “I’m so sorry that you’re sad. That must be frustrating,” and then wrap up with some distraction: “Let’s go find your ball and play catch, okay?’

be consistent

Probably most of us have experienced that anything worth doing works better when done consistently. It’s the same with exercise, reading our Bibles, eating well and studying for exams in school. 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 desire to avoid 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 physical consequence when they are blatantly defiant, while another might just need time alone in their room for five minutes and yet another will turn their attitude around if a prized toy or privilege is taken away for a time.

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. It is my hope that you will be able to find success in your own parenting journeys with the techniques you find and implement!

There are as many ways to discipline a child as there are types of children. In my five 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, with a few deliberately placed techniques thrown in here and there.

At least that’s been my experience.

Yes, riding in cars with boys.

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