Blog - A Fine Parent

What to Do When Your Kids Are Mean

by Marianne Griebler.
(This article is part of the Building Character series. Get free article updates here.)

Have your kids ever said something so unexpectedly mean that it made you recoil with horror?

When our second daughter, Claire, was born, it was immediately clear that Sarah, our first born, was not a fan.

She put on a good show initially – at least as a good a show as you can when you’re 2-1/2 and your world has been turned upside down. She claimed to love the baby; she would pat Claire’s head, try to feed her Cheerios and read her board books in a high-pitched, sing-songy voice.

Soon these charitable acts were interspersed with minor acts of terrorism. Pinching. Yelling. Failed attempts to tip over Claire in her baby bouncer.

I couldn’t leave the two of them alone in a room. All of my pleas to Sarah to love her sister fell on deaf ears. I envisioned a future where my home looked more like a war zone filled with mean kids than the peaceful, compassionate haven of my dreams.

The low moment came one day when Claire was napping.

Sarah was keeping me company in the kitchen while I cleaned up from lunch. As I wiped down the highchair tray, Sarah wrinkled her nose and suggested that the baby was way too messy. In the broken English employed by three-year-olds, she confided in me that the solution was to take that baby, dump her in the garbage and watch her “head crack open like an egg.”

This was the solution my three-year-old offered me to put an end to messy highchair trays, forever!

I don’t think I can fully capture the horror of the moment.

How could my sweet little angel say such a thing?

How could she be – I could barely summon the word – so MEAN?

The Words that Make Us Recoil in Horror

[Read more…]

Positive Parenting Pledge for 2015 + Giveaway

by Announcements & Such.
(This article is part of the Updates & Announcements series. Get free article updates here.)

Positive Parenting Pledge From the surveys, your comments and your response to my emails so far, one thing is clear –

We are a community of parents who love the idea of positive parenting. And yet, many of us struggle to implement the ideas on a day-to-day basis.

What say we do something about it? Let’s end this year and start the next one with a bang. Let’s take a pledge, as a community, to be positive parents in 2015.

I’ll be taking the pledge right alongside you, and will support you in this pledge the best I can –

All articles in 2015 will be approached from a positive parenting perspective. For instance, based on your choice in our last survey, our theme for January is “Raising kids with character”. So, every article published in Jan will look at how a positive parent would go about instilling certain character traits in kids.
If you run into specific issues while you try to practice positive parenting, and you can’t find answers in already published articles, just send me an email. Either I or one of the members of our wonderful writer community (you can be a part of it too — details here) who has experience in that matter will put together an article for you. And, if none of us can be of help, I will reach out to some of the top positive parenting experts to find their suggestions for what we can do.

One more thing. We are very fortunate to have Dr. Laura Markham support us in this pledge. As some of you probably know she is one of my favorite parenting experts and has been pivotal in my choice to become a more positive parent. Thanks to Dr. Laura, every parent who takes the pledge will be entered into a giveaway, and one lucky parent will win access to Dr. Laura’s course Stop Punishing, Start Connecting, and Raise a Self-disciplined, Emotionally Intelligent Child.

So, are you in?

Let’s do this!

Take the the pledge here –

“I Will Be a Positive Parent in 2015” Pledge + Giveaway

Child Not Doing Homework? Read This Before You Try Anything Else

by Tanith Carey.
(This article is part of the Be Positive series. Get free article updates here.)

With less than an hour to go before my seven-year-old daughter’s bedtime, my home was a long way from being the oasis of calm I was hoping for at that time of evening.

Instead, Lily had just scribbled all over her homework worksheet, thrown her pencil on the floor and was now yelling at the top of her voice: “I hate Math! I suck at it!”

With my younger daughter to put to bed, Lily in a melt down and me exhausted after a day at work, the tension was rapidly rising.

But even if I could calm ourselves down, there was no end in sight. Even if I could persuade her to finish her math homework, Lily still had the whole book reading to do.

So I was facing two choices –

Should I stand over her and insist that not doing homework was NOT an option?

Or should I tell her to put the books away, write a note to her teacher and just let her unwind and play in the lead up to bedtime?

Have you been there? What choice would you make?

The choice I would make now is very different to what my choice would have been a few years back.

Back then, I’d try to push through with a mixture of cajoling and prompting and assurances that she did know how to do her Math really.

If that didn’t work then maybe in despair and frustration that she didn’t seem to want to try, I would have gotten angry and tried to explain how serious I was about this.

A Game of One-Upmanship

[Read more…]

6 Secrets of Highly Effective Discipline From a Seasoned Teacher

by Stephanie Byrne-Biancardi.
(This article is part of the Be Positive series. Get free article updates here.)

Have you noticed how kids behave differently at school than at home?

As an early education teacher, one of the most common questions I get from parents when they see their kids voluntarily cleaning up the classroom or sharing happily with other kids is:

How do you do that? My son always throws his stuff around at home and doesn’t like sharing toys with his brother! How do you get him to cleanup and share here without grumbling and drama?

I am also a mother of four. Over the years, I’ve taken some of the effective classroom discipline techniques and applied them at home. And they’re as effective at home as they are in the classroom.

Today, I’d like to share with you the 6 secrets of highly effective discipline. [Read more…]

8 Positive Discipline Techniques Every Parent Should Know

by Kaila Weingarten.
(This article is part of the Be Positive series. Get free article updates here.)

Don’t you sometimes wish you had a remote control to stop your child’s behavior with the click of a button before things start to spiral out of control?

I remember thumbing through the Parents Magazine a while back and reading about a kid who told his pesky little sister — “I wish you were a toy that required batteries so I can take them out.“

I sometimes wish my kids had removable batteries in them too!

Then again, forget about a remote control or batteries… I’ll settle for a simple pause, just one tiny moment, to collect my wits and figure out the best way to deal with a situation without blowing my top off.

Sigh!

Since none of these fantasies have a chance of coming true any time soon, I’d like to propose a modification to a strategy Sumitha suggested some time back to keep ourselves from yelling at kids even when we are hopping mad –

Assuming you are not angry at the moment, now is the time to decide how you will respond at a later time when you are indeed angry. Making a list of possible responses and then reaching out to your pre-committed choices when you are angry, substantially increases your chances of success [at not yelling at kids]. There is a whole body of research to support this.

Here’s my suggestion. Let’s make a list of all the positive discipline techniques that we know of, and spend a few minutes looking at some example scenarios where they work well. This way, when the time comes for us to react (and sooner or later, it will), hopefully we’ll come up with an appropriate gentle response without having to think too hard. Or blowing our fuse. Sort of. Maybe.

To be the positive parent you’ve always wanted to be, click here to get our FREE mini-course How to Be a Positive Parent.

Anyway, I’ll start out with 8 of the positive discipline techniques that I’m familiar with. How about you help grow this list by sharing your favorite techniques in the comments? [Read more…]