Take one large stick (How to Discipline Children)

Name: sympatic

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Product:	How to Discipline Children
Date:	27/10/05 (161 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tough

Disadvantages: Fear of getting it wrong.

This weeks Independant on Sunday had a fascinating article on how to bring up children. It highlighted the example of a 14 year old girl who was in front of her psychiatrist having already had sex, taken drugs and attempted suicide in her young life. The slant to the article was that all the assumptions you could make about her upbringing were wrong, she did not come from a broken home, she was not the victim of abuse and she did not come from a dysfunctional family and there was no history of mental illness, instead she was the product of a caring family unit whose only fault the article asserted was that the parents had been too caring and had not raised their child to understand he word no.

What the article went on to highlight was the good intentions parents have and how these can be interpreted by a child into negatives or lead to negative behaviour.

For a child to grow up well balanced it is important as a parent that you give them the opportunity to experience the downside of life. If a parent constantly stimulates a child then they can grow up expecting this to be done for them at all times, it is good for a child to be bored sometimes as from this comes imagination and creativity where they will create their own stimulus.

Giving in to a child constantly creates the impression that to demand something is to get something. Thre is nothing wrong in using the word no. Often parents will want to give a reason to their children that they can understand and accept and they will constantly seek a new reaon until the child understands. This can lead the child to realise that if they do not accept the reasoning behind the decision they are due another reason. Sometimes it is enough for a child to understand that the answer is no for no other reaso than that is the way things are.

Discipline is an issue and is one of the toughest things to get right as a parent, increasingly the responsibility for discipline is passed to other people and institutions as both parents choose to work full time, either a child minder, grandparent or school however schools no longer have the tools available to discipline children and a child minder is running a business while for many of us we are trying to bring our children up with a different value set to those of our parents.

The best advice is to be balanced, consistent and to use the word no when appropriate.

Summary: Discipline of children.