Parenting From The Source

Improving child behavior depends on the child’s learning that there will always be consequences for his or her actions. They either happen naturally or are created by parents to fit the misbehavior.

The young man sat in my high school counseling office. “I’m grounded for the rest of the year,” he moaned. “I won’t even get to enjoy being a senior. What am I going to do?” How Parents Typically Punish Teens As a counselor, I learned a couple of things about how parents punish their kids. [...]

The hardest part of discipline is being consistent. See my previous article Consistency in Discipline and my confession in Comments. Teaching Obedience I heard a story about a parent trying to get her eighteen-month-old son to stay off the floor she was mopping. The easiest way to do that would have been to put him in [...]

The room was eerily quiet considering that it held over twenty preteens. The young man facing off against me was tall enough to look me straight in the eye when he declared, “You can’t make me.” My teacher training took over, reminding me that confrontations should never take place in front of other students. I [...]

When no one was watching, Isabella ran her finger around the icing on her sister’s birthday cake. Then, as if she knew she hadn’t done enough damage, she got a spoon and took bites out of the side. She then picked up her doll and sat on the couch to wait for the coming fireworks. [...]

In my last post, I wrote about first-time obedience with older children. I said, “Consequences for disobedience must be delivered every time.” That sounds great, but I hear from parents all the time that they cannot find a punishment that works with their older children. Consequences for disobedience must meet two criteria.

First-time obedience is harder if a child is several years old and accustomed to waiting for his parents to repeat their instructions or correction several times. There were times I let my children slip into the habit of ignoring me the first few times, and it was hard to get back on track.

Do we punish our children, or do we discipline them? Or, do we do both? I hear the words used in interchangeably. “Punish” comes from the root word punier meaning to inflict penalty or pain for an offense. Both “discipline” and “disciple” come from the root word discere which means to learn. Christ’s disciples learned from him and [...]

Communication can be difficult between teens and their parents.  How do we correct without angering?  Suppose that your daughter breaks a family rule.  Without calling, she arrives home an hour past curfew. You’re worried and angry – worried that something happened to her and angry that she is disregarding your curfew.  Because emotions are involved, [...]

I spent Christmas in the home of one of my children. A grandson has a new German shepherd nine-week-old puppy. Although most of the duties are handled by my grandson, the entire family pitches in with the training efforts.  My daughter explained that there are two approaches to training dogs (much like two popular methods [...]