by Jennifer Moore

Created on: February 19, 2009

The subject of discipline is very broad and controversial. Parents often question which methods are the best for effectively disciplining children. Some believe in more physical methods while others strictly oppose these methods. There are however some proven techniques that can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your discipline strategies, whatever your position on discipline may be. The goal after all, is not to raise the most obedient children but to raise confident, responsible individuals capable of making sensible decisions.

Aside from not abusing or hurting your children, the first rule and most important thing in disciplining your child is to do what feels right. If you get suggestions for discipline or punishment measures that you are not comfortable with, simply discard them. Follow your instincts, you as the parent, with your child's best interests at heart, are best qualified to determine what measures are right for disciplining your child.

Secondly, keep the consequence or punishment relative to the behavior. Suppose you pull out the couch to vacuum and discover that your child has decorated the back of your couch with marker. A punishment from the television really doesn't relate to the crime at all. Alternatively, requiring your child to help clean the couch and putting the markers away for a certain period of time would be a better option. Rather than punishing to punish, this teaches your child that the decisions he or she makes will have consequences and that poor choices are going to have negative consequences. In this case, your child is being held responsible to clean up his/her own mess and cannot use markers for a period of time as a result of the decision to color the couch.

Thirdly, follow through with the consequence. There are two ways to ensure follow through. Number one, don't threaten anything that you are not prepared to follow through with. Making threats without follow through discredits your commitment to discipline. You're not the only one who knows that you can't ground your child from television for life, your child knows this too. So, in addition to preventing you from following through with the outrageous punishment you just dished out, you're setting yourself up for giving in, which brings us to the second way to ensure follow through; stick to the entire punishment. If you dish out a two week ban from video games, don't give in after three days. Your child has to know that you mean what you say and you say what

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