When we talk about discipline, something in me is made to shake, because I can't help identifying it with adult-centered authoritarianism. However, discipline is necessary, it is the way to help people to be more responsible and respectful of others. This term best applies what has come to be called positive discipline and what I prefer to call discipline with love .
The foundations of a discipline with love
The key is to use non-punitive methods, that is, without punishment, to help convey a message with respect, love, assertiveness and firmness. It is not being lax, or letting intolerable behavior pass by its aggressiveness or negativity, but using other forms of communication than judgments or imposition.
Above all, we will start by understanding the reasons why children act as they act, without prejudging or labeling them as bad, but working on deepening the real causes of inappropriate behaviors.
Self-criticism starting with ourselves
We have to get, in addition to doing what we believe best for them, that we can also understand that sometimes Your needs are not consistent with the demands of our society, and that, only learning to respect them too, rectifying if we were wrong to want to fit them into schemes that do not match what is necessary to have a natural and happy childhood, will we be able to give them safe tools to act in society with freedom and empathy.
Understand the consequences, not live them as punishments
Some of the things we can try is to leave that children understand the consequences of their actions, with open questions that make them discover how others feel about their behavior or what it can entail to stay in their line, instead of presenting the consequences as events already happened and immovable, which often come to become punishments.
We must look together the right solutions for everyone involved, getting them involved in them from their own motivation, not as something imposed from outside and incomprehensible to them.
Importance of intrinsic motivation
Intrinsic motivation is something basic for both your childhood behavior as for their development as complete and confident people. There is no day in life in which we begin to be responsible, of course it is not at 18. The responsibility and the desire to behave properly and to treat others well is a process, which is reached not from the authority imposed, but from trial and error and the desire to achieve that goal.
Mistakes are learning
Another of the things we must learn to always convey is that mistakes are not personal failures that leave indelible marks. Mistakes do not make us wrong people, but they give us an essential and necessary opportunity in the human being: we learn from our failures. Wrong is an opportunity to learn.
Cooperating with the child invites you to be creative and to have confidence in yourself and in us, always teaching you that you own your own destiny while maintaining our loving and firm guidance.
Discipline with love will make you more aware of its value
Children are members of the community since they are born. They are persons. They must learn through trial and error to collaborate with their family and the social groups in which they are integrated, knowing that they are valuable from childhood, feeling valued and heard, without this detrimental to the rights of others to be also Valued and heard.
That is, raising in a respectful way is not letting children do what they want without helping them understand that they can harm others. We must accompany their growth with a firm and loving presence, but not from imposition or punishment. Making them feel bad teaches nothing, children learn from love and communication, not from shame or anger. Actually, in that, as in many other things, they function like adults, we are human beings alike.
It is not fast or simple, it may seem more effective to scream or impose a punishment, but in the long run, the conversation will serve to lay a healthy foundation for family communication and coexistence.
The child who values himself and trusts in his capacity can be seen as a person capable of improving and offering the best of himself to others. And that is the goal of the education and care that parents give them, not to win a game, but to give them the opportunity to be good people, useful and valuable, safe and capable of educating the next generations from discipline with love.
