Do you ever feel doomed to being just like your parents, even though you’re trying hard to do better?

I know how hard it is to try being a positive parent when you’ve been raised in a punitive home.

Like me, you may have grown up in a home where spanking, hitting, yelling, or shaming were the main “discipline techniques.” And now maybe you’re horrified to find yourself resorting to these techniques, too.

I lay SweetPea down on the floor to change her diaper. Immediately she twists her hips to flip over so she can crawl away. Clenching my jaw, I flip her on her back again and try to distract her with singing, but she is intent on reaching her activity center. Unbidden, the image of my hand slapping the soft, tender flesh of her thigh flashes through my mind.  I take a deep breath. I acknowledge my own frustration. I decide she and I both need a break from the struggle. “We’ll try again in a few minutes,” I say as I let her go and she happily crawls away.

My impulse to lash out comes naturally to me; I absorbed it from my parents. I’ve spent the last 15 years as a teacher and nanny learning how to react differently and overcome these unbidden impulses so that I don’t pass them on to my daughter.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to take you 15 years to start becoming a more positive parent! I’ll share with you how I healed from childhood wounds and techniques you can use now to re-write your parenting scripts.

Choosing a Better Way

Re-creating the same negativity is not our destiny; we can choose a better way to raise our own kids.

The question, of course, is how?

Despite our best intentions, the things our parents said to us often become the same dreaded words we say to our kids.

“Because I said so.” 

“Stop that crying right this instant.” 

“That’s it! No TV for you tonight.”

Like my momentary impulse to slap my daughter when she resists diaper changes, the way we were parented becomes our automatic default response.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. [Read more…]

“I’m so proud!”  “What a good girl!” “You are SO talented!”

So, there are worse things to say to your child – right?

Of course! But… there are better things to say to them as well, without trafficking in the kind of never-ending praise that sends our kids into a “need it, crave it, got to have it” almost addiction to getting patted on the back.

For many families it’s the beginning of a very slippery slope into entitlement that they find hard to reverse.

“But Amy, that’s what parents DO.”

I get it!

You think you’re helping them be more poised and self-assured, but left unchecked, you may be setting your kid up to be a person who needs constant “atta boys” from everyone around them to feel good about his own ability or choices.

Younger praise junkies may seek approval from parents and teachers.  “Do you like my singing, Daddy?”  “Was that a good shot?”

But when they’re older – their limitless need for affirmation can send kids gravitating towards their peers or the boyfriend/girlfriend for approval, and becoming the kind of entitled, high-maintenance people that most of us don’t really want to be around.

So, all good intentions aside, let’s start turning that praise junkie tide right now in your home with these three steps:

[Read more…]

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…]

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…]

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.

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…]