The Seven Deadly Sins of Discipline

By Ann Douglas

Back in the days before you became a parent, you had this discipline thing down to an art. You knew exactly what you were going to do to keep your future offspring from morphing into unruly brats. Or so you thought.

But now that you've actually become someone's parent, you've discovered that teaching a child to behave isn't quite as easy as it looks. In fact, if you're like most of us, you've no doubt worked your way through most of the seven deadly sins of discipline by now. Here's the lowdown on the discipline world's not-so-greatest hits.

1. Not wanting to discipline your child, period. If you find yourself apologizing for the fact that you have to discipline your child or taking away the punishment five minutes after you've meted it out, try reminding yourself that your actually doing your child a favor each time you give him a lesson in how to behave. You're helping him to become the type of person other people will want to be around. Why should you feel apologetic about that?

2. Sounding indecisive when you make a discipline decision. If there's even an iota of hesitation in your voice when you come up with a consequence for your child when he has misbehaved, all of your parenting credibility goes out the window in a flash. You can't expect your child to take you seriously if you discuss discipline matters in such a watered down manner that your child assumes that the consequence in question is optional, not mandatory: for example, "I'd like you to take a timeout in your room now, okay?" Say it like you mean it, or don't even bother disciplining your child at all.

3. Applying a one-size-fits-all discipline strategy to all of your kids. While it's tempting to try to apply the exact same rules to each of your children, by bending over backwards to be fair, you may actually end up be being unfair. "What works for one child doesn't work for all three of them," explains Margaret, a 27-year-old mother of three quoted in The Mother of All Parenting Books. "Different consequences lead to different outcomes depending on the child, so I try to pick whatever consequences will work best for each child." If, like Margaret, you make a point of fine-tuning the basic family rules based on the age, temperament, abilities, strengths and weaknesses of each of your children, you'll no doubt find that those rules will feel fairer for all concerned.

4. Losing your cool when it comes time to discipline your child. Not only are you likely to make poor discipline decisions if you allow yourself to become overly emotional: you're also going to lose a lot of your credibility as a parent the next time you try to sell your child on the merits of remaining calm, cool, and collected. So rather than going ballistic the next time your child out-and-out refuses to do what you've asked her to do, breathe deeply and challenge yourself to come up with a way of dealing with the situation that doesn't involve screaming, shouting, or otherwise coming unglued.

5. Allowing too long a delay between the "crime" and the "sentencing." The courts recognize the accused's right to a speedy trial-the rational being that it's pretty hard to see any link between the punishment and the crime if you can no longer remember exactly what it was that you did that was so wrong. We parents should aim for a similarly speedy delivery of justice when it's necessary to come up with a consequence for a child's actions. The only situations that would warrant a delay are situations when you are feeling too angry to make a rational decision (you're likely to come down to hard on your child) and situations that are likely to cause undue embarrassment to your child (you're better to wait until you are better able to deal with the situation in a more private setting). Otherwise, you should plan to come up with a consequence as quickly as possible.

6. Allowing the punishment to last too long. While it's tempting to make a particular punishment last for weeks or months at a time if you're really upset by something that your child has done, most child development experts agree that it's best to take away privileges in smaller increments, such as days or even hours. If you take away your child's privileges in larger blocks of time (e.g., taking away your child's TV privileges for a month), you've just lost one of your major discipline tools. Making the punishment last too long or taking away too many privileges at a time can cause a child to abandon all hope and lose all incentive to behave-something that can lead to a plot to overthrow the ruling authorities (that would be you!).

7. Waving the discipline white flag because you don't have the time or the energy to deal with the problem. At times, it can seem a lot easier to look the other way than to deal with a particular incident of misbehavior. Unfortunately, these problems tend to snowball over time. So unless you want to be stuck picking up your kids' laundry until the day they leave home-and perhaps doing loads of laundry each time they drop by for visits after that!-you may want to teach them to toss their own dirty clothes in the laundry hamper right from day one.

While no one expects you to reach discipline nirvana anytime soon, the more of the seven deadly sins of discipline you can steer clear of, the smoother your parenting journey will be. Bon voyage!

Ann Douglas is the author of The Mother of All Parenting Books. She can be contacted via her website at www.having-a-baby.com.