Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Mean Threats are not Good Parenting!




Timeouts are effective for young children.  They should be one minute for each year of the child's age.  This time allows them to reflect on what they did and gives both the child and parents a brief break to calm down.


Writing a parenting blog does not mean that I think my husband and I were perfect parents...far from it.  We made our share of mistakes and learned from our missteps.  Hopefully, as you read my blog and you can learn from our experiences.  When we were young parents, I remember using threats at times to get our toddlers to behave.  And I also will admit to relying heavily on the Santa threats when the hectic holiday season was upon us.  But as our family grew and our parenting knowledge grew along with it, my husband and I stopped using threats to get our children to behave.  We started to rely on our own confidence as parents.  We expected our children to behave because we said so, and they understood that if they were choosing to be uncooperative there would be consequences.  Consequences that we all knew about.  When they were young, it was timeouts, and when they were older it was a whole host of things; losing a play date, having a toy taken for a certain amount of time, extra chores or even writing a paper!  My husband liked to get creative.

This type of parenting was a lot easier than making scary threats and hoping the threats scared them into doing what we wanted.  And through the years I have heard of parents using some whoppers!  I understand that parents, when utterly frustrated and embarrassed will resort to saying just about anything, but threatening that the police are going to have to come to your house and take your tyke to jail, or the pilot of the plane will be coming back to deal with your child's behavior are empty and frankly ridiculous ploys on the part of the parent!  You can do better and your children deserve better. Using fear and humiliation are not effective or healthy ways to discipline your child.  Remember that you are the adult in the relationship.  Your child looks up to you.  Therefore, learn discipline techniques that are positive and relationship building rather than destructive and negative.  There are classes and books and blogs that discuss positive discipline techniques.  Educate yourself and your parenting partner so that you both are committed to effective and mentally healthy methods of disciplining your children.  You might also enjoy reading this:


splashparenting.com/2013/03/six-steps-toward-positive-discipline

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