How to Discipline Your Child

We all assume that children are not born knowing how to act in accordance with the rules of their families or society. We assume that most children learn to behave appropriately and inappropriately through their daily life activities. Teaching them is one aspect of child rearing, and parents play a key role in disciplining or teaching their children to behave according to a wide variety of rules. Although parental rules vary across families, the age of the child, cultures, and periods of time, most people know a rule when they hear one. There are common rules in place for children in American families such as doing what your parents tell you to do and do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. When children do not behave according to the rules, we say they have misbehaved. When parents use ineffective strategies to manage misbehavior, we say they have made discipline mistakes.

Parents are undoubtedly not the only people who significantly influence children's misbehavior. Siblings, day-care providers, teachers, baby-sitters, grandparents, and peers are participants in child rearing. The younger the child, however, the more influential parents are likely to be. Interest in parental discipline practices has a long history, and scientifically established relations between discipline mistakes and children's behavior disorders have been reported since nearly sixty years ago. Young children's aggressive and oppositional behavior disorders are quite stable; if left untreated, these disorders predict later delinquency, drug and alcohol abuse, family violence, unemployment, and psychiatric disturbance. Understanding what constitutes effective and ineffective parental discipline practice, particularly for young children, should include both the prevention and the treatment of children's behavior problems.

There are four points that must be understood before effective parental discipline can take place. First, managing children's misbehavior is certainly not all there is to rearing children; responsive nurturing and the provision of a positive emotional and physical environment are also critical components of responsible child rearing. Second, being a "nice" parent is not equivalent to being a "good" parent. As a matter of fact, one discipline mistake is responding positively to misbehavior. Third, advocating appropriate, effective discipline is not equivalent to advocating stronger punishment; a frequent discipline mistake is being overreactive and harsh. Finally, the focus of this review is parental mistakes in disciplining children's disruptive, oppositional, and aggressive behaviors. We know much less about the relation of parenting to childhood anxiety, fear, and depression. We also do not know whether the discipline mistakes would still be problematic, ineffective, or both if the child misbehavior were raised very differently, as might be the case in another culture.

Early, retrospective studies of child rearing indicated that inconsistent, harsh, and excessively lax discipline practices are associated with delinquency and aggression. Similarly, observational studies of preschoolers found that mothers who are harsh in their use of authority tend to have children who are not self-reliant or content and who are aggressive; mothers who are permissive tend to have children who are dependent and not well-behaved. At a more specific level, the degree of parental inconsistency, receptiveness to bargaining, use of indirect commands, lack of enforcement, and demonstration of affection during discipline episodes are associated with the degree of resistance and noncompliance displayed by one and a half and three and a half year olds. Comparisons of normal and clinic samples indicate that parents of aggressive, antisocial, and noncompliant children issue more frequent commands and negative consequences, engage in lengthier and more intense coercive interchanges with their children, are more submissive and ambiguous, and are less consistent in their responses to problem behaviors. These parents also are more likely to reinforce oppositional behavior with attention, softening of commands, or coaxing.

This large number of probable discipline mistakes was identified primarily by time-consuming and expensive observations of parent-child interactions. To increase the efficiency with which we can assess parents' discipline practices, a 30-item self-report Parenting Scale was developed. Factor analyses of the Parenting Scale repeatedly reveal three primary types of mistakes made by mothers of 2- to 4-year-old children: laxness, overreactivity, and verbosity. Laxness includes giving in, not enforcing rules, and providing positive reinforcement for misbehavior. Overreactivity includes anger, meanness, and irritability. Verbosity involves the propensity to engage in lengthy verbal interactions about misbehavior even when the talking is ineffective. These factors are consistent with other theoretical formulations of parental discipline, are reliable, correlate weil with observations of maternal behavior, and are comparable across normal and problematic populations. The Parenting Scale appears to be a useful tool for identifying mothers whose discipline strategies may put their children at risk for developing serious behavior problems.

All of the findings just outlined must be viewed with some caution because of the correlational methodologies used in the research; however, recent experiments in the laboratory and elsewhere support a causal link between parental discipline mistakes and young children's misbehavior. Some of this research was conducted in homes, but most took place in laboratory settings. Mothers of both normal and hard-to-manage toddlers and preschoolers were instructed to respond to the relevant misbehaviors in specified ways. It has been demonstrated that delayed, long, and gentle reprimands result in higher levels of misbehavior than do immediate, brief, and firm reprimands.

Another mistake is leaving a two-year-old on his or her own for too long. This mistake is referred to as poor monitoring and found it to be one of the best predictors of outcome for older children. We have also learned that mothers are less effective when they try to distract their misbehaving children than when they use clear reprimands. In fact, when distraction does not work and mothers change their tactics to reprimanding, children become upset, as though they are offended by the change. On the other hand, children are not particularly upset when they are consistently and prudently reprimanded. Distraction may be less effective than reprimanding because distraction provides positive attention to misbehavior.

One last example of a strategy that may inadvertently reinforce misbehavior involves the use of timeout (i.e., removal of the child from sources of reinforcement for a brief period of time). Although time-out can be very effective for reducing noncompliance and aggression, young children often attempt to escape from the commonly used timeout chair. Some parents deal with an escaping child by holding the child in the chair, thus providing attention for the misbehavior. Others give up very quickly and allow the child to determine when time-out is over. Both of these strategies are mistakes and are less effective than ensuring that the child remains in the time-out chair for the assigned period of time, for example, by calmly turning the chair toward the wall.

Parents usually say they do not know what to do with their children or are not able to allow themselves to do it. Most education on how to parent is informal and indirect, so it is not surprising that parents have these problems. We observe our parents and relatives managing child misbehavior, and these people often offer advice about how we should raise our own children. Unfortunately, not all of what we observe or are told is consistent with what the scientific literature tells us. Parents who need to learn what effective discipline is would benefit from more structured educational experiences. The best time for such training might be when parents begin teaching their children to follow rules, that is, when the children begin to crawl. People are probably not particularly motivated to learn before they have children; waiting until the toddler or preschool years means dysfunctional parenting may already be established, and correcting dysfunctional parenting is surely harder than preventing it.

Sources:

http://www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0605-stein.html

http://kidshealth.org/parent/positive/talk/discipline.html

http://www.childrensdayton.org/health_topics/Parenting_News/Punishing_Your_Children.html

http://www.scribd.com/doc/9943484/Bringing-Up-Children-Discipline

http://www.gradebook.org/ParentalDiscipline.htm