Discipline
Why Positive Discipline?
Children misbehave when they feel bad about themselves and disconnected from us. The word "Discipline" means to teach, which raises the question of how kids learn how to behave. Research shows that children learn best when they feel heard and valued, not when they feel on the defensive. Here's how to use discipline that works, so you can get out of the discipline business 
altogether.
How to Use Positive Discipline
Your ten-step guide to putting positive discipline to work in your house, from setting limits effectively to weaning yourself off yelling and punishment.
What's Wrong with Strict Parenting?
Most parents assume that strict parenting produces better-behaved kids. However, research studies on discipline consistently show that strict, or authoritarian, child-raising actually produces unhappy kids who feel bad about themselves and behave worse than other kids -- and therefore get punished more! Here's why.
What's Wrong with Permissive Parenting?
Infants' wants are identical to their needs. But over time, that changes. Toddlers' wants are often in direct opposition to their long-term developmental needs and safety. When parents don't make that developmental leap and learn to set limits, their children don't develop the ability to tolerate frustration or to manage themselves. These children are often referred to by others as “spoiled.”
Setting Effective Limits
Setting limits is one of the most important skills of parenting. Limits keep our children safe and healthy and socialize them enough so that they can function happily in society. And if we do it right, our kids will internalize the ability to set limits for themselves, which is otherwise known as self-discipline. Why neither permissiveness nor strictness works, and how to chart an effective middle course.
Don't Give In -- Give Choices!
Giving choices may be the single most useful tool parents have for managing life with young children. How to use this trick effectively, and why it works.
Timeouts and Consequences
Why timeouts are vastly better than hitting, but ineffective at getting your child to behave -- and a sign that you need to figure out a better strategy! Why consequences, as used by most parents, backfire, and how you can use them effectively.
Should You Spank Your Child?
If your parents used spanking as a discipline method growing up, you may have reconciled yourself to their behavior by justifying it: You came out ok. You may even think there is no other choice for managing kids who are "a handful." How else do kids learn? We now have a wealth of studies on how spanking affects kids. The research shows clearly that children do indeed learn from spanking, but they don't learn what we want them to.
Parenting Your Strong-Willed Child
Breaking a child's will is a betrayal of the spiritual contract we make as parents to nurture our child's unique gifts. That said, strong-willed kids can be a handful -- high energy, challenging, persistent. How do we protect those fabulous qualities and still encourage their cooperation -- without going crazy?
Handling Your Own Anger
All parents get angry at their children. We're all wounded in some way from our own childhoods, and our kids surface all those wounds. It doesn’t help that there are always the endless pressures of life: appointments we’re late to, things we’ve forgotten until too late, health and financial worries -- the list is endless. In the middle of that hectic momentum, enter our child, who has lost her sneaker, suddenly remembered she needs a new notebook for school today, is teasing her little brother, or is downright belligerent. And we snap. In our calm moments, if we’re honest, we know that we could handle any parenting moment much better from a state of calmness. But in the storm of our anger, we feel righteously entitled to our fury. How can this kid be so irresponsible, inconsiderate, ungrateful? Here's how to handle yourself so you can handle your child.
For Parents: Healing Yourself
The bad news is that virtually all of us were wounded as children, and if we don't heal those wounds, they prevent us from parenting our children optimally. If there’s an area where you were scarred as a child, you can count on that area causing you grief as a parent. But the good news is that being parents gives us an opportunity to heal ourselves. Most parents say that loving their children has transformed them: made them more patient, more compassionate, more selfless. Our children have an unerring ability to show us our wounded places, they draw out our unreasonable fears and angers. Better than the best zen master or therapist, our children give us the perfect opportunity to grow and heal. Almost magically, as our wounds transform, we find that these hurt places inform us, motivate us, make us better parents.
