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Positive Parenting Tools

So, what tools and ideas will help your child learn all she needs to know? If punishment doesn’t work, what does? Here are some suggestions. Remember, your child’s individual development is critical in these years; remember, too, that nothing works all the time for all children. As your unique child grows and changes, you’ll have to return to the drawing board many times, but these ideas will form the foundation for years of effective parenting.

Get Children Involved
Education comes from the Latin root educare, which means “to draw forth.” This may explain why children so often tune you out when you try to “stuff in” through constant demands and lectures. Instead of telling children what to do, find ways to involve them in decisions and to draw out what they think and perceive. Curiosity questions (which often begin with “what” or “how”) are one way to do this. Ask, “What do you think will happen if you push your tricycle over the curb?” or “What do you need to do to get ready for preschool?” Children who are involved in decision making experience a healthy sense of personal power and autonomy. For children who are not yet able to talk, say, “Next, we_________,” while kindly and firmly showing them what to do.

There are several particularly effective ways of getting preschoolers involved in cooperation and problem solving. Here are three suggestions:

Create routines together.
Young children learn best by repetition and consistency, so you can ease the transitions of family life by involving them in creating reliable routines. Routines can be created for every event that happens over and over: getting up, bedtime, dinner, shopping, and so on. Sit down with your child and invite her to help you make a routine chart. Ask her to tell you the tasks involved in the routine (such as bedtime). Let her help you decide on the order. Take pictures of her doing each task that can be pasted next to each item. Then let her illustrate the chart with markers and glitter. Hang it where she can see it, and let the routine chart become the boss. When your child gets distracted, you can ask, “Whats next on your routine chart?” (Be sure not to confuse these with sticker or reward charts, which diminish your child’s inner sense of capability because the focus is on the reward.)

Offer limited choices.
Having choices gives children a sense of power: they have the power to choose one possibility or another. Choices also invite a child to use his thinking skills as he contemplates what to do. And, of course, young children often love it when choices include an opportunity to help. “What is the first thing you will do when we get home—help me put the groceries away or read a story? You decide.” “Would you like to carry the blanket or the cracker box as we walk to the car? You decide.” Adding “You decide” increases your child’s sense of power. Be sure the choices are developmentally appropriate and that all of the choices are options you are comfortable with. When your child wants to do something else, you can say, “That wasn’t one of the choices. You can decide between this and this.”

Provide opportunities for your child to help you.
Young children often resist a command to get in the car but respond cheerfully to a request like “I need your help. Will you carry the keys to the car for me?” Activities that might easily have become power struggles and battles can become opportunities for laughter and closeness if you use your instincts and your creativity. Allowing your child to help you (even when it’s messy or inconvenient) also sets the stage for cooperation later on.

Teach Respect by Being Respectful
Parents usually believe children should show respect, not have it shown to them. But children learn respect by seeing what it looks like in action. Be respectful when you make requests. Don’t expect a child to do something “right now” when you are interrupting something she is thoroughly engaged in. Give her some warning: “We need to leave in a minute. Do you want to swing one more time or go down the slide?” Carry a small timer around with you. Teach her to set it to one or two minutes. Then let her put the timer in her pocket so she can be ready to go when the timer goes off.

Remember, too, that making a child feel shame and humiliation—such as a child might feel if she was spanked in the middle of the park (or anywhere else, for that matter)—is disrespectful, and a child who is treated with disrespect is likely to return the favour. Kindness and firmness show respect for your child’s dignity, your own dignity, and the needs of the situation.

Use Your Sense of Humour
No one ever said parenting had to be boring or unpleasant. Laughter is often the best way to approach a situation. Try saying, “Here comes the tickle monster to get children who don’t pick up their toys.” Learn to laugh together and to create games to get unpleasant jobs done quickly. Humour is one of the best—and most enjoyable—parenting tools.

Three-year-old Nathan had an unfortunate tendency to whine, and Beth was at her wits’ end. She had tried talking, explaining, and ignoring, but nothing seemed to have any effect. One day Beth tried something that was probably more desperation than inspiration. As Nathan whined that he wanted some juice, Beth turned to him with a funny look on her face. “Nathan,” she said, “something is wrong with Mommy’s ears. When you whine, I can’t hear you at all!” Again Nathan whined for juice, but this time Beth only shook her head and tapped her ear, looking around as if a mosquito were buzzing near her head. Nathan tried once more, but again Beth shook her head. Then Beth heard something different. The little boy took a deep breath and said in a low, serious voice, “Mommy, can I have some juice?” When Beth turned to look at him, he added “Please?” for good measure. Beth laughed and scooped Nathan up for a hug before heading to the kitchen. “I can hear you perfectly when you ask so nicely,” she said. From that time on, all Beth had to do when Nathan began to whine was tap her ear and shake her head. Nathan would draw an exasperated breath—and begin again in a nicer tone of voice.

Not everything can be treated lightly, of course. But rules become less difficult to follow when children know that a spontaneous tickling match or pillow battle might erupt at any moment. Taking time to lighten up and to laugh together works where discipline is concerned, too, and makes life more pleasant for everyone.

Get into Your Child’s World
Understanding your preschooler’s developmental needs and limitations is critical to parenting during these important years. Do your best to be empathetic when your child becomes upset or has a temper tantrum out of frustration with his lack of abilities. Empathy does not mean rescuing. It means understanding. Give your child a hug and say, “You’re really upset right now. I know you want to stay.” Then hold your child and let him experience his feelings before you gently guide him to leave. If you rescue your child by letting him stay, he won’t have the opportunity to learn from experience that he can survive disappointment. Getting into your child’s world also means seeing the world from his perspective and recognizing his abilities—and his limitations. Occasionally ask yourself how you might be feeling (and acting) if you were your child. It can be illuminating to view the world through a smaller person’s eyes.

Say What You Mean, Then Follow Through with Kindness and Firmness
Children usually sense when you mean what you say and when you don’t. It’s usually best not to say anything unless you mean it and can say it respectfully—and can then follow through with dignity and respect. The fewer words you say, the better! This may mean redirecting or showing a child what she can do instead of punishing her for what she can’t do. It also might mean wordlessly removing a child from the slide when it is time to go, rather than getting into an argument or a battle of wills. When this is done kindly, firmly, and without anger, it will be both respectful and effective.

Be Patient
Understand that you may need to teach your child many things over and over before she is developmentally ready to understand. For example, you can encourage your child to share, but don’t expect her to understand the concept and do it on her own when she doesn’t feel like it. When she refuses to share, rest assured that this doesn’t mean she will be forever selfish. It will help to understand that she is acting age-appropriately. Don’t take your child’s behavior personally and think your child is mad at you, bad, or defiant. Act like the adult (sometimes easier said than done) and do what is necessary without guilt and shame.

Act, Don’t Talk—and Supervise Carefully
Minimize your words and maximize your actions. As Rudolf Dreikurs once said, “Shut your mouth and act.” Quietly take your child by the hand and lead her to where she needs to go. Show her what she can do instead of what she can’t do. And no matter how bright, cooperative, or quick to learn your child is, be sure to supervise her actions carefully. Preschoolers are often impulsive little people and your child will need your watchful attention for years to come.

Accept and Appreciate Your Child’s Uniqueness
Children develop differently and have different strengths. Expecting from a child what he cannot give will only frustrate both of you. Your sister’s children may be able to sit quietly in a restaurant for hours, while yours get twitchy after just a few minutes, no matter how diligently you prepare. If you simply accept that, you can save yourself and your children a lot of grief by waiting to have that fancy meal when you can enjoy it in adult company—or when your children have matured enough for all of you to enjoy it together.

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Using positive discipline to empower a child

Positive Discipline is effective with preschoolers because it is different from conventional discipline. It has nothing to do with punishment (which many people think is synonymous with discipline) and everything to do with teaching valuable social and life skills.

Discipline with young children involves deciding what you will do and then kindly and firmly following through, rather than expecting your child to “behave.” As your child matures and becomes more skilled, you will be able to involve him in the process of focusing on solutions and participating in limit setting. In this way he can practice his thinking skills, feel more capable, and learn to use his power and autonomy in useful ways—to say nothing of feeling more motivated to follow solutions and limits he has helped create.

The principles of Positive Discipline will help you build a relationship of love and respect with your child and will help you solve problems together for many years to come.

The building blocks of Positive Discipline include:

Mutual respect
Parents model firmness by respecting themselves and the needs of the situation, and kindness by respecting the needs and humanity of the child.

Understanding the belief behind behavior.
All human behavior has a purpose. You will be far more effective at changing your child’s behavior when you understand the motivation for it. (Children start creating the beliefs that form their personality from the day they are born.) Dealing with the belief is as important as (if not more important than) dealing with the behavior.

Effective communication
Parents and children (even young ones) can learn to listen well and use respectful words to ask for what they need. Parents will learn that children “hear” better when they are invited to think and participate instead of being told what to think and do. And parents will learn how to model the listening they expect from their children.

Understanding a child’s world
Children go through different stages of development. By learning about the developmental tasks your child faces and taking into account other variables such as birth order, temperament, and the presence (or absence) of social and emotional skills, your child’s behavior becomes easier to understand. When you understand your child’s world, you can choose better responses to her behavior.

Discipline that teaches
Effective discipline teaches valuable social and life skills and is neither permissive nor punitive.

Focusing on solutions instead of punishment
Blame never solves problems. At first, you will decide how to approach challenges and problems. But as your child grows and develops, you will learn to work together to find respectful, helpful solutions to the challenges you face, from spilled Kool-Aid to bedtime woes.

Encouragement
Encouragement celebrates effort and improvement, not just success, and helps children develop confidence in their own abilities.

Children do better when they feel better
Where did parents get the crazy idea that in order to make children behave, parents should make them feel shame, humiliation, or even pain? Children are more motivated to cooperate, learn new skills, and offer affection and respect when they feel encouraged, connected, and loved.

When people talk about “discipline” they usually mean “punishment” because they believe the two are one and the same. Parents and teachers sometimes yell and lecture, spank and slap hands, take away toys and privileges, and plop children in a punitive time-out to “think about what you did.”

Unfortunately, no matter how effective punishment may seem at the moment, it does not create the long-term learning and social and life skills parents truly want for their children.

Punishment only makes a challenging situation worse, inviting both adults and children to plunge headfirst into power struggles. Positive Discipline is based on a different premise: that children (and adults) do better when they feel better.

Positive Discipline is about teaching (the meaning of the word discipline is “to teach”), understanding, encouraging, and communicating—not about punishing. Most of us absorbed our ideas about discipline from our own parents, our society, and years of tradition and assumptions. We often believe that children must suffer (at least a little) or they won’t learn anything. But in the past few decades, our society and culture have changed rapidly and our understanding of how children grow and learn has changed, so the ways we teach children to be capable, responsible, confident people must change as well.

Punishment may seem to work in the short term. But over time, it creates rebellion, resistance, or children who just don’t believe in their own worth. There is a better way, and this post is devoted to helping parents discover it.

There is a difference between wants and needs, and your child’s needs are simpler than you might think. All genuine needs should be met. But when you give in to all of your child’s wants, you can create huge problems for your child and for yourself.

For example, your preschooler needs food, shelter, and care. He needs warmth and security. He does not need a pint-sized computer, a television in his bedroom, an iPod, or a miniature monster truck to drive. He may love staring at the television screen, but experts tell us that any kind of screen time at this age may hamper optimal brain development. He may want to sleep in your bed, but he will feel a sense of self-reliance and capability by learning to fall asleep in his own bed. He may love french fries and sugary soda, but if you provide them you could be setting the stage for childhood (and adult) obesity. You get the idea.

From his earliest moments in your family, your young child has four basic needs:

1. A sense of belonging and significance
2. Perceptions of capability
3. Personal power and autonomy
4. Social and life skills

If you can provide your child with these needs, he will be well on his way to becoming a competent, resourceful, happy human being.

The Importance of Belonging and Significance

“Well, of course,” you may be thinking, “everyone knows a child needs to belong.” Most parents believe that what a child really needs is quite simple: he needs love. But love alone does not always create a sense of belonging or worth. In fact, love sometimes leads parents to pamper their children, to punish their children, or to make decisions that are not in their child’s long-term best interest.

Everyone—adults and children alike—needs to belong somewhere. We need to know that we are accepted unconditionally for who we are, rather than just our behavior or what we can do. For young children, the need to belong is even more crucial. After all, they’re still learning about the world around them and their place in it. They need to know they are loved and wanted even when they have a tantrum, spill their cereal, break Dad’s golf clubs, or make yet another mess in the kitchen. Children who don’t believe they belong become discouraged, and discouraged children often misbehave.

Notice the word believe. You may know your child belongs and is significant. But if he doesn’t believe it (sometimes for the darnedest reasons, such as the birth of another baby), he may try to find his sense of belonging and significance in mistaken ways.

In fact, most young children’s misbehavior is a sort of “code” designed to let you know that they don’t feel a sense of belonging and need your attention, connection, time, and teaching. When you can create a sense of belonging and significance for every member of your family, your home becomes a place of peace, respect, and safety.

Perceptions of Capability

Your preschooler will never learn to make decisions, learn new skills, or trust his own abilities if you don’t make room for him to practice. Parenting in the preschool years involves a great deal of letting go. Words alone are not powerful enough to build a sense of competence and confidence in children. Children feel capable when they experience capability and self-sufficiency—when they are able to successfully do something—and from developing solid skills.

Personal Power and Autonomy

Developing autonomy and initiative are among the earliest developmental tasks your child will face. And while parents may not exactly like it, even the youngest child has personal power—and quickly learns how to use it. If you doubt this, think about the last time you saw a four-year-old jut out his jaw, fold his arms, and say boldly, “No! I don’t want to!” Part of your job as a parent will be to help your child learn to channel his considerable power in positive directions—to help solve problems, to learn life skills, and to respect and cooperate with others. Punishment will not teach these vital lessons: effective and loving discipline will.

Social and Life Skills

Teaching your child skills—how to get along with other children and adults, how to feed and dress herself, how to learn responsibility—will occupy most of your parenting hours during the preschool years. But the need for social and practical life skills never goes away. In fact, true self-esteem does not come from being loved, praised, or showered with goodies—it comes from having skills. When children are young, they love to imitate parents. Your child will want to hammer nails with you, squirt the bottle of detergent or prepare breakfast (with lots of supervision). As he grows more capable, you can use these everyday moments of life together to teach him how to become a competent, capable person. Working together to learn skills can occasionally be messy, but it’s also an enjoyable and valuable part of raising your child.

Positive discipline is well, positive. It emphasises goodness instead of punishment, positivity instead of criticism. Used correctly, it empowers children and emboldens them to continually do the right thing for the correct reasons, rather than because of the fear of punishment.

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When should you start potty training?

It would be so much easier if there were a magic age at which to potty train your child. You could simply wake up on the morning that he reaches, say, 26 months, plonk him on the potty – and hey presto!

However, every child is different. Some gain the necessary physical, mental and emotional developmental skills as early as 18 months, whereas others aren’t ready until they’re 3 or 4 years old.

Some get the hang of it over a weekend, while others take months. By responding to your child’s signals you can let him set the agenda, so that you’ll both find the transition from nappies to pants as painless as possible.

Weeing or pooing on the potty is a highly complex process. Really, it is. It may not seem very difficult to you, but when you break down the number of skills that are needed to succeed it’s incredible that someone as young as a 2- or 3-year-old could ever master it.

Your toddler has to be able to recognize the signs that he needs to go to the toilet, and then hold on to it long enough to get there. He then has to remember where the potty is, walk to it, grapple with his clothing and pull down his pants – and all this before he even sits down to do his business. Finally, he needs to wipe his bottom, get dressed and wash his hands.

In order for a child to succeed, he has to be physically and mentally ready. Scientists have identified a number of stages your child will go through while developing bladder and bowel control:

1. He becomes aware of having a wet or dirty nappy or clothing. This can occur from 15 months.

2. He recognizes when he is doing a wee or a poo, and may learn the words to tell you all about it. This takes place between 18 and 24 months, or later in some children.

3. He can tell you in advance that he will need to go, with sufficient warning for you to get him to the potty in time. On average, this occurs between 21/2 and 3 years.

4. He gains more control of his bladder and can ‘hold on’ for a while. This takes place from 3 years onwards.

Research has shown that a child cannot voluntarily use the muscles that control his bladder and rectum until he is at least 18 months old. There is a gap of roughly 2 years between the age when a child first starts to recognize that he’s wet, and the time when he can actually hold on and wait before he passes urine. Potty training will be faster if your child is at the last stage before you start; although with perseverance you can certainly achieve dryness earlier, it will be a longer, more drawn-out and, probably, messier process.

A child who is physically ready may still not be prepared to let go of her nappies. Motivation is the key, and a toddler who is becoming more independent and keen to do things for herself will be more interested in going to the toilet like a grown-up than a child who is at an earlier stage of her emotional development. Many children will show strong signs that they are physically, mentally and emotionally ready for potty training before the age of 3. However, at least 15 per cent of children are not potty trained by that age, and 4 per cent still haven’t mastered it by 4 years. It’s important not to panic that your child is falling behind. One research study presented at a European conference for bladder and kidney specialists revealed that for healthy children, bladder capacity increases significantly between the ages of 2 and 3 years, so that by the time they are 3 most children are able to hold on and stay dry for longer periods of time. Your child will get there, in her own time.

In the USA, pediatricians have a saying about potty training: ‘If you start at 2, you’ll be done by 3. If you start at 3, you’ll be done by 3!’

Research is now confirming what parents have known for years: that boys tend to be a little slower to gain control of their bladders and bowels than girls. One study showed that, on average, boys both started and completed potty training later than girls.

According to American research, the average age for completion of potty training (day and night-time dryness) was 35 months for girls and 39 months for boys.

This difference is thought to be due to several factors:

1 Boys’ nervous systems mature later. Girls can begin to gain bladder control from the age of 18 months, whereas with boys it may not be until after 22 months.

2 Women still tend to be the main carers, so boys do not see a same-sex role model as often as girls do.

3 Boys appear to be less sensitive to the feeling of wetness against their skin. But don’t get bogged down in the detail. Every child is different, and if your son seems ready then you should go for it, whatever his age.

Most children will show characteristic signs when they are ready to take on potty training – you just have to be able to recognize these and act on them. If that sounds too much like taking part in a complicated detection exercise, take heart from the fact that some children, especially those with older siblings, can make it very easy for you.

Is your child ready? Many children’s signals are subtler than my daughter’s were. Although there isn’t a checklist you should tick off, there is a gradual accumulation of indicators that your child is becoming physically, mentally and emotionally ready to learn to go to the toilet.

Your child may be ready to start toilet training if:

‘I can do it’ becomes a regular refrain, showing that your toddler wants to become more independent.

He has regular, formed bowel movements, and he may go red in the face and gain a very concentrated expression when he’s about to go.

He has the dexterity to pull his pants up and down by himself.

He’s very interested when his father goes to the toilet and imitates his actions.

He is developed physically so that he can walk and sit down on the potty.

He knows what wee and poo are and may talk about them when you’re changing his nappy.

You may notice that his nappy is dry for longer periods, up to three or four hours. This shows that his bladder capacity and control are improving.

He can understand what you are saying and follow simple instructions, such as ‘Go and get your teddy.’

He starts to recognize the sensations that he needs to go to the toilet and demonstrates this by looking uncomfortable, holding onto himself or grunting. Soon he’ll learn to tell you before it happens.

He may become uncomfortable and complain if his nappy is dirty. He may start to rip off his nappy every time he does a wee in it, which means he can go through ten nappies a day. If this is the case, simple economics dictate that it’s time to reach for the potty.

Potty-training practices have changed considerably over the years. Mothers from previous generations were encouraged to start extraordinarily early, and it was not unheard of to balance babies on the potty as soon as they could sit up, or even earlier. While it is important to balance the advice of previous generations with modern ones, perhaps it is best for all to sense when your child is ready, and then work towards it.

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Embracing unconditional parenting

What do you do when a child throws a tantrum? If a child has a strop before bedtime and once things calm down, should you proceed with the normal evening routine of snuggling with her and reading a story together? The conditional approach to parenting says no: We would be rewarding her unacceptable behaviour if we follow it with the usual pleasant activities. Those activities should be suspended, and she should be informed, gently but firmly, why that “consequence” is being imposed.

This course of action feels reassuringly familiar to most of us and consistent with what a lot of parenting books advise. What’s more, it would have been satisfying on some level for us to lay down the law, for the parent to put our foot down, letting her know she wasn’t allowed to act like that.

The unconditional approach to parenting, however, says this is a temptation to be resisted, and that we should indeed snuggle and read a story as usual. But that doesn’t mean we ought to just ignore what happened. Unconditional parenting isn’t a fancy term for letting kids do whatever they want. It’s very important (once the storm has passed) to teach, to reflect together. Whatever lesson we hope to impart is far more likely to be learned if the child knows that your love for her is undimmed by how she had acted.

Whether we’ve thought about them or not, each of these two styles of parenting rests on a distinctive set of beliefs about psychology, about children, even about human nature.

To begin with, the conditional approach is closely related to a school of thought known as behaviourism, which is commonly associated with the late B. F. Skinner. Its most striking characteristic, as the name suggests, is its exclusive focus on behaviours. All that matters about people, in this view, is what you can see and measure. You can’t see a desire or a fear, so you might as well just concentrate on what people do. Furthermore, all behaviours are believed to start and stop, wax and wane, solely on the basis of whether they are “reinforced.”

Behaviourists assume that everything we do can be explained in terms of whether it produces some kind of reward, either one that’s deliberately offered or one that occurs naturally. If a child is affectionate with his parent, or shares his dessert with a friend, it’s said to be purely because this has led to pleasurable responses in the past.

In short: External forces, such as what someone has previously been rewarded (or punished) for doing, account for how we act—and how we act is the sum total of who we are. Even people who have never read any of Skinner’s books seem to have accepted his assumptions. When parents and teachers constantly talk about a child’s “behaviour,”they’re acting as though nothing matters except the stuff on the surface. It’s not a question of who kids are, what they think or feel or need. Forget motives and values: The idea is just to change what they do. This, of course, is an invitation to rely on discipline techniques whose only purpose is to make kids act—or stop acting—in a particular way.

A more specific example of everyday behaviourism: Perhaps you’ve met parents who force their children to apologize after doing something hurtful or mean. (“Can you say you’re sorry?”) Now, what’s going on here? Do the parents assume that making children speak this sentence will magically produce in them the feeling of being sorry, despite all evidence to the contrary? Or, worse, do they not even care whether the child really is sorry, because sincerity is irrelevant and all that matters is the act of uttering the appropriate words?

Compulsory apologies mostly train children to say things they don’t mean—that is, to lie. But this is not just an isolated parental practice that ought to be reconsidered. It’s one of many possible examples of how Skinnerian thinking — caring only about behaviours — has narrowed our understanding of children and warped the way we deal with them. We see it also in programs that are intended to train little kids to go to sleep on their own or to start using the potty.

From the perspective of these programs, why a child may be sobbing in the dark is irrelevant. It could be terror or boredom or loneliness or hunger or something else. Similarly, it doesn’t matter what reason a toddler may have for not wanting to pee in the toilet when his parent asks him to do so.

Experts who offer step-by-step recipes for “teaching” children to sleep in a room by themselves, or who urge us to offer gold stars, M&Ms, or praise for tinkling in the toilet, are concerned not with the thoughts and feelings and intentions that give rise to a behaviour, only with the behaviour itself.

(While I haven’t done the actual counting that would be necessary to test this, I would tentatively propose the following rule of thumb: The value of a parenting book is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behaviour.)

Let’s come back to the hypothetical example. Conditional parenting assumes that reading her a book and otherwise expressing our continued love for her will only encourage her to throw another fit. She will have learned that it’s okay to wake the baby and refuse to get in the bath because she will interpret our affection as reinforcement for whatever she had just been doing.

Unconditional parenting looks at this situation—and, indeed, at human beings—very differently. For starters, it asks us to consider that the reasons for what a child has done may be more “inside”than “outside.” Her actions can’t necessarily be explained, in mechanical fashion, by looking at external forces like positive responses to her previous behaviour. Perhaps she is overwhelmed by fears that she can’t name, or by frustrations that she doesn’t know how to express. Unconditional parenting assumes that behaviours are just the outward expression of feelings and thoughts, needs and intentions. In a nutshell, it’s the child who engages in a behaviour, not just the behaviour itself, that matters.

Children are not pets to be trained, nor are they computers, programmed to respond predictably to an input. They act this way rather than that way for many different reasons, some of which may be hard to tease apart. But we can’t just ignore those reasons and respond only to the effects (that is, the behaviours). Indeed, each of those reasons probably calls for a completely different course of action. If, for example, it turned out that a child is really being defiant there may be an underlying cause to deal with at that time instead of the carrot-stick approach.

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Effective Parenting: Redefining “Good”

Almost twenty-five years ago, a social psychologist named Elizabeth Cagan reviewed a bushel of contemporary parenting books and concluded that they mostly reflected a “blanket acceptance of parental prerogative,” with little “serious consideration of a child’s needs, feelings, or development. ”The dominant assumption, she added, seemed to be that the parents’ desires “are automatically legitimate,” and thus the only question open for discussion was how, exactly, kids could be made to do whatever they’re told.

Sadly, not much has changed since then. More than a hundred parenting books are published every year, along with countless articles in parenting magazines, and most of them are filled with advice about how to get children to comply with our expectations, how to make them behave, how to train them as though they were pets. Many such guides also offer a pep talk about the need to stand up to kids and assert our power—in some cases explicitly writing off any misgivings we may have about doing so.

This slant is reflected even in the titles of recently published books: Don’t Be Afraid to Discipline; Parents in Charge; Parent in Control; Taking Charge; Back in Control; Disciplining Your Preschooler—and Feeling Good About It; ’Cause I’m the Mommy, That’s Why; Laying Down the Law; Guilt-Free Parenting; “The Answer Is No”; and on and on. Some of these books defensively stand up for old-fashioned values and methods (“Your rear end is going to be mighty sore when your father gets home”), while others make the case for newfangled techniques (“Good job! You peed in the potty, honey! Now you can have your sticker!”). But in neither case do they press us to be sure that what we’re asking of children is reasonable—or in their best interests. It’s also true, as you may have noticed, that many of these books offer suggestions that turn out to be, shall we say, not terribly helpful, even though they’re sometimes followed by comically unrealistic parent-child dialogues intended to show how well they work.

But while it can be frustrating to read about techniques that prove to be ineffective, it’s much more dangerous when books never even bother to ask, “What do we mean by effective?” When we fail to examine our objectives, we’re left by default with practices that are intended solely to get kids to do what they’re told. That means we’re focusing only on what’s most convenient for us, not on what they need. Another thing about parenting guides: Most of them offer advice based solely on what the author happens to think, with carefully chosen anecdotes to support his or her point of view. There’s rarely any mention of what research has to say about the ideas in question.

Indeed, it’s possible to make your way clear across the child-care shelf of your local bookstore, one title at a time, without even realizing that there’s been a considerable amount of scientific investigation of various approaches to parenting. Some readers, I realize, are skeptical of claims that “studies show ”such-and-such to be true, and understandably so. For one thing, people who toss that phrase around often don’t tell you what studies they’re talking about, let alone how they were conducted or just how significant their findings were. And then there’s that pesky question again: If a researcher claims to have proven that doing x with your kids is more effective than doing y, we’d immediately want to ask, “What exactly do you mean by effective? Are you suggesting that children will be better off, psychologically speaking, as a result of x? Will they become more concerned about the impact of their actions on other people? Or is x just more likely to produce mindless obedience?”

Some experts, like some parents, seem to be interested only in that last question. They define a successful strategy as anything that gets kids to follow directions. The focus, in other words, is limited to how children behave, regardless of how they feel about complying with a given request, or, for that matter, how they come to regard the person who succeeded in getting them to do so. This is a pretty dubious way of measuring the value of parenting interventions. The evidence suggests that even disciplinary techniques that seem to “work”often turn out to be much less successful when judged by more meaningful criteria. The child’s commitment to a given behaviour is often shallow and the behavior is therefore short-lived.

But that’s not the end of the story. The problem isn’t just that we miss a lot by evaluating our strategies in terms of whether they get kids to obey; it’s that obedience itself isn’t always desirable. There is such a thing as being too well behaved. One study, for example, followed toddlers in Washington, D.C., until they were five years old and found that “frequent compliance [was] sometimes associated with maladjustment.”

Conversely, “a certain level of resistance to parental authority can be a “positive sign.”Another pair of psychologists, writing in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, described a disturbing phenomenon they called “compulsive compliance,” in which children’s fear of their parents leads them to do whatever they’re told—immediately and unthinkingly. Many therapists, too, have commented on the emotional consequences of an excessive need to please and obey adults. They point out that amazingly well-behaved children do what their parents want them to do, and become what their parents want them to become, but often at the price of losing a sense of themselves.

We might say that discipline doesn’t always help kids to become self-disciplined. But even that second objective isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not necessarily better to get children to internalize our wishes and values so they’ll do what we want even when we’re not around. Trying to foster internalization—or self-discipline—may amount to an attempt to direct children’s behavior by remote control. It’s just a more powerful version of obedience. There’s a big difference, after all, between a child who does something because he or she believes it’s the right thing to do and one who does it out of a sense of compulsion. Ensuring that children internalize our values isn’t the same thing as helping them to develop their own. And it’s diametrically opposed to the goal of having kids become independent thinkers.

Most of us do indeed want our children to think for themselves, to be assertive and morally courageous . . . when they’re with their friends. We hope they’ll stand up to bullies and resist peer pressure, particularly when sex and drugs are involved. But if it’s important to us that kids not be “victims of others’ ideas,” we have to educate them “to think for themselves about all ideas, including those of adults.” Or, to put it the other way around, if we place a premium on obedience at home, we may end up producing kids who go along with what they’re told to do by people outside the home, too.

Author Barbara Coloroso remarks that she’s often heard parents of teenagers complain, “He was such a good kid, so well behaved, so well mannered, so well dressed. Now look at him!” To this, she replies: From the time he was young, he dressed the way you told him to dress; he acted the way you told him to act; he said the things you told him to say. He’s been listening to somebody else tell him what to do. . . . He hasn’t changed. He is still listening to somebody. Just not you; it’s his peers.

The more we ponder our long-term goals for our kids, the more complicated things become. Any goal might prove to be objectionable if we consider it in isolation: Few qualities are so important that we’d be willing to sacrifice everything else to achieve them. Maybe it’s wiser to help children strike a balance between opposing pairs of qualities, so that they grow up to be self-reliant but also caring, or confident yet still willing to acknowledge their limitations.

Likewise, some parents may insist that what matters most to them is helping their children to set and meet their own goals. If that makes sense to us, then we have to be prepared for the possibility that they’ll make choices and embrace values that aren’t the same as ours. Our thinking about long-term goals may lead us in any number of directions, but the point I want to emphasize is that however we think about those goals, we ought to think about them a lot. They ought to be our touchstone, if only to keep us from being sucked into the quicksand of daily life with its constant temptation to do whatever it takes to get compliance.

As parents of children, we are well acquainted with the frustrations and challenges that come with the job. There are times when our best strategies fall flat, when our patience runs out, when we just want my kids to do what we tell them. It’s hard to keep the big picture in mind when one child is shrieking in a restaurant. For that matter, it’s sometimes hard to remember the kind of people we want to be when we’re in the middle of a hectic day, or when we feel the pull of less noble impulses. It’s hard, but it’s still worthwhile.

Some people rationalize what they’re doing by dismissing the more meaningful goals— such as trying to be, or to raise one’s child to be, a good person— as “idealistic.” But that just means having ideals, without which we’re not worth a hell of a lot. It doesn’t necessarily mean “impractical.” Indeed, there are pragmatic as well as moral reasons to focus on long-term goals rather than on immediate compliance, to consider what our children need rather than just what we’re demanding, and to see the whole child rather than just the behaviour.

This is subversive stuff— literally. It subverts the conventional advice we receive about raising kids, and it challenges a shortsighted quest to get them to jump through our hoops. For some of us, it may call into question much of what we’ve been doing— and perhaps even what was done to us when we were young.

The issue is not merely discipline but, more broadly, the ways we act with our children, as well as how we think about them and feel about them. It requires us to reconsider basic assumptions about parent-child relationships and think of practical alternatives to the tactics we’re sometimes tempted to use to make our kids behave, or to push them to succeed to help our kids to grow up as good people— good, that is, in the fullest sense of that word.