5 Sure-fire Ways To Make Discipline Effective

A child’s behavior won’t change unless you lay a sound foundation for healthy discipline. Otherwise, children may not respond to consequences, like redirection or time out. Here are five core ways to make discipline effective:

If a parent, teacher, or babysitter doesn’t have a healthy relationship with a child, discipline isn’t likely to work.

If your child assumes that you do not like or respect him, he isn’t going to care about pleasing that you. Likewise, if you’re “mean,” a child may comply with occasional requests but in the long-term, it isn’t likely you’ll be effective in teaching a new behavior.

The need for a healthy relationship is essential when it comes to step-parents. Step-parents who immediately try to discipline a child – before building a healthy relationship – often find that the child is non-compliant and argumentative. It’s imperative for step-parents to focus on relationship building first before attempting to parent a child.

2. Make Discipline a Teaching Tool

If you simply tell children, “Don’t do that,” and “You’re in time-out,” without ever teaching him the correct behavior, he won’t learn how to avoid repeating the same mistake next time. If a mother tells her children, “Stop fighting,” when they’re arguing over who gets to a first turn, she won’t have taught them how to resolve conflict peacefully.

To really help a child change his behavior, discipline should be used as a teaching tool. That means helping kids identify new ways to manage their behavior and showing them healthy choices they can make. Often, that means practicing, role modeling, and even role playing new behavior.

3. Be Consistent

If you only enforce a consequence one out of every five times your child hits his brother, he’s not going to stop hitting his brother. After all, it’s worth the risk if there’s only a 20% chance he’ll get into trouble.

To be effective, discipline needs to be applied consistently. If you place your child in time-out for hitting every single time he behaves aggressively, he’ll begin to link the consequence to his misbehavior and over time, he’ll recognize that hitting leads to consequences. Consistent discipline, combined with effective teaching of new behaviors, helps children recognize how to change their behavior.

4. Make Consequences Immediate

Immediate consequences help kids connect the dots between their behavior and the consequence. If a child doesn’t lose her phone privileges for at least a week after she lied about getting her homework done on time, the consequence won’t be as effective.

There may certainly be times that you can’t give an immediate consequence. Sometimes, you may not discover your child has broken the rules until hours – or even days – later. In those instances, a late consequence may be your only option. But it’s important to avoid saying things like, “Wait until your father gets home,” because a consequence served several hours later will be less effective.

5. Make Sure Consequences Are Perceived as Fair by your Child

If your 12-year-old forgets to do his homework one night, and you ground him from using any electronics for a month, your child isn’t likely to perceive that as a fair consequence. So he may sneak in some phone time when you’re not around. Or he may turn on the TV when you’re not paying attention. He isn’t likely to abide by the consequence if he doesn’t think you’ve given him a fair deal.

When kids are convinced they’ve been served an injustice, they’ll fight it every step of the way.  That doesn’t mean you should always negotiate with your child and give in when he protests about the consequence you’ve handed down, but it does mean you should ensure that your punishments aren’t overly harsh.

Source: discipline.about.com