Disciplining Children Is To Teach Children Basic Norms And Attitudes By The Way
YOU treat THEM
That Will Make Later Punishment Largely Unnecessary

Disciplining Children is all about passing on basic norms and attitudes to your young children that will set the stage for later and more meaningful parental teaching.

This Disciplining Children page will focus on very young children from the ages of six months to six years.

Actually, the principles and attitudes that parents must share and model and live by in order to effectively Discipline Children should start at birth, but for our purposes I will assume all parents understand the importance and lasting consequences of being loving and kind and nurturing to a newborn baby.

For that reason we will pick this story up at the six-month-old stage.

To better understand in what context I will be using the term ‘Disciplining Children’ within this web page, you need to understand that:

To Discipline Children = To Teach Children

And further, in the realm of proper parenting, especially if we are wise enough to start from the very earliest ages of our children’s lives:

To Teach = To Teach By Example

And further:

To Teach By Example = To Teach By How We Daily Live And Interact With Our Young Children

So the final parental Disciplining Children equation we must use is:

To Discipline Children = To Teach Fundamental Norms, Attitudes, And Behaviors To Our Young Children By How We Daily Live And Interact With Them

This is the working definition that will be used for the discussion to follow on Disciplining Children, specifically young children, since this is the only framework around which such a parental discussion can have validity and any hope of practical parenting success.

Hopefully by now you have picked up on a parenting truth that is little understood and sadly little applied in the world today, and that is:

Disciplining Children DOES NOT MEAN TO Punish Children

To better understand this important concept you can download our Free Discipline Guidelines Report.

Children at the ages we are speaking about here are in much more need of proper discipline (i.e. Teaching) than of punishment.

The sad irony is that as children grow older they typically get punished as a consequence of the failure of parents to adequately discipline and teach these same children the proper basics of attitude and comportment earlier in their life.

There is also a Highly Praised Behavioral Program for parents who need extra help and direction with their children.

When we think of Disciplining Children we need to think about creating a ‘Soft Love Parenting Style’, in contrast to a Tough Love Parenting mentality.

Note: The parenting principles used in both cases are the same, but it is the parental mindset we want to focus on here.

The emphasis is on Soft Love versus Tough Love.

Very young children need to feel the soft love of an approving and accepting parent who still acts like the parent. By this I mean a parent can still be soft and age-appropriate with a tender child and yet be firm in the understanding that the parent is the parent and the child is the child.

Parents need to ALWAYS act with the authority and confidence of ‘The Parent’, and not confuse kindness with weakness, just as we best not confuse discipline with punishment.

When parents are comfortable and confident in their roles as parents, with all of the teaching and decision making that role implies, then children learn THEIR place in the family quickly, and happiness and order is established and can be maintained within the family much easier thereafter.

The soft yet firm approach always works best and especially with younger children.

DSC01827 - © Stevegatto2

Let us always remember that it is our young children we are talking about here. They are cute and adorable; they are part of who we are and quite irreplaceable to our current and future happiness.

Their emotional and mental well-being should be no less important to us as is their physical well-being.

What cannot be seen is often of MORE importance than that which is apparent with the naked eye.

No parent wants to see their child mistreated, and no parent wants to be the cause of that mistreatment.

Disciplining Children is to consistently treat your young child in the ways that you want your child to act for the rest of their lives. This is how parents teach their children core values of right and wrong, of acceptable and desired attitudes and behaviors.

Very young children are incapable of understanding complex language and concepts, so parents begin to rightly Set Limits within their homes more by feelings and example and less by words.

These limits and expectations are more of loving parental intonations and mannerisms at these early stages of child development.

They are transmitted and delivered to your young children by how you treat and interact with them, especially since very young children don’t understand exactly what you are saying, but they are never unsure of how you are making them feel.

All of this is vital to the process of discipline, teaching, and all things parenting.

Disciplining Children is to understand that young children are acting and learning much more on an “instinctive level” for the first few years of their life, since speaking in full sentences generally comes after a child is two years old and may be beyond their current capabilities.

So parents are teaching their children norms and attitudes by HOW they are interacting and speaking with their children on a daily basis, and not so much by WHAT they are saying.

Your tone of voice IS critical at this stage, but your actual words (or their literal meaning), not so much.

Disciplining Children at this stage is to create loving bonds of trust and security between parent and child.

In essence you are setting the stage for later and more meaningful teaching and communication to occur between you and your child based on the loving and respectful manner in which you are and will have treated your child since their earliest memories.

Parents should be guiding and directing their children from the very beginning, according to their ages and ability to comprehend, in all the lessons of life we parents need to teach them.

This occurs so naturally as a part of daily living that many parents may forget that they are ALWAYS teaching their children by the things they do and say.

As parents, our actions are never done alone and always affect others beyond ourselves, especially and particularly those within the walls of our own homes.

We tell our children “We don’t hit the cat”, and “we don’t bite”, and Disciplining Children is occurring in simple moments such as these.

If a toddler spills a glass of milk and we don’t yell and overreact, we are guiding our children in moments such as these.

When we tell our five-year-old child not to eat any cookies before dinner and we later discover that half the bag of cookies is gone . . . .

We Do Not punish our child since it is OUR fault we left the cookies on the table, and it is not reasonable to expect a young child of five to resist this temptation with a bag of cookies easily in reach.

This is where age-specific expectations and outcomes need to be understood and practiced by parents everywhere.

In the above example, our children’s bad behavior can rightly be traced to our parenting mistake, or oversight as it were, in leaving the cookies on the table within easy reach of a five-year-old cookie-eater.

Parents make cookies, and God makes five-year-olds to eat them :-)

Disciplining Children is to understand that MOST behavioral issues with our young children can be directly traced back to some parenting issue that we didn’t get quite right with our children in the first place.

So do we never punish our children?

Quite the contrary, we DO punish our children but only when they are old enough to understand that they are doing something wrong, and usually only after we have given them a few chances to mend their ways before the punishment is applied.

To have Kids Fighting, for example, is never appropriate and must not be tolerated.

We as parents should begin to understand that when we see our children acting in inappropriate ways and living with inappropriate attitudes, these are signs that we as parents have more work to do to correct the root cause of these negative attitudes and behaviors.

This additional parental work takes the form of more communication, teaching, disciplining, and when necessary, age-appropriate punishment to act as a motivating force to help our children to correct their behaviors and attitudes accordingly.

In such cases Disciplining Children requires that we as parents take the time to understand what lessons we need to still teach our children, or review with our children, and then proper parenting demands that we take the time to impart these additional life lessons to our children yet once again in a loving and patient and understandable manner.

Our children’s misbehaviors should act as warning signs to us that more proper parenting needs to happen. They act as reminders that more parental teaching and training and mentoring needs to occur.

The real question is, what is a parent to do if a child is misbehaving and yet, upon closer examination, the child is only doing exactly what they see us as Parents doing in our everyday life?

Do we love our children more than we love our bad habits, and are we willing to be good examples to our children so they can learn to live better lives themselves?

How each parent Honestly answers THAT question will make all the difference in the lives of the children they love and parent.

Disciplining Children means starting when your children are very young to model the behaviors you want to see your children act out in their own lives. It is to be loving and patient on a daily basis as you help to mold your child, step by step, into a polite and respectable human being.

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