that creates a distance between you and your child and advice that draws you closer together. Pick advisers who have raised lots of children and whose kids you like. Make friends with them, watch them in action, and learn from them.
Yes, you must take charge of your child, but not in a controlling way. Yes, you should communicate with your child, but in the context of a trusting relationship. Yes, you need discipline tools to help you handle real-life situations, but when these techniques don’t work, you need to fall back on a deeper understanding of your child. With an attachment approach to discipline, you can have confidence that your child will (for the most part) behave well and develop the inner controls needed to live a happy, productive life. Where the authoritarian approach says, “I’ll tell you what to do”, the communication approach says “What do you think is the right thing to do?” and the behaviour modification approach says “If you do that, then this will happen”, our suggestion is to give your child the attachment message “You can trust me to help you know what to do.”
Strong parent – child connection.
Weak parent – child connection.
In the next section we will give you an overview of the attachment approach to discipline. You will see how all these other approaches fit into the total package. Remember that discipline is a package deal, and that all the separate parts must be held together by a right relationship with your child.
discipline’s top ten – an overview of this book
One day I was watching a family in my waiting room. The toddler played happily a few feet away from the mother, sometimes returning to her lap for a brief reconnecting cuddle, and then darting off again. As he ventured farther away, he glanced back at her for approval. Her nod and smile said “It’s OK”, and he confidently explored new toys. The few times the child started to be disruptive, the mother connected eye-to-eye with him and the father physically redirected him so that he received a clear message that a change in behaviour was needed. There was a peace about the child and a comfortable authority in the parents. It was easy to see that they had a good relationship. I couldn’t resist complimenting them: “You are good disciplinarians.” Surprised, the father replied, “But we don’t smack our child.”
Our understanding of the word “discipline” was obviously different, like many other parents, they equated discipline with reacting to bad behaviour. They didn’t realize that mostly discipline is what you do to encourage good behaviour. It’s better to keep a child from falling down in the first place than to patch up bumps and scrapes after he has taken the tumble.
Discipline is everything you put into children that influences how they turn out. But how do you want your child to turn out? What will your child need from you in order to become the person you want him to be? Whatever your ultimate objectives, they must be rooted in helping your child develop inner controls that last a lifetime. You want the guidance system that keeps the child in check at age four to keep his behaviour on track at age forty, and you want this system to be integrated into the child’s whole personality, a part of him or her. If your child’s life were on videotape and you could fast-forward a few decades, what are the qualities you would like to see in the adult on the tape? Here is our wish list for our children:
• sensitivity
• confidence and solid self-esteem
• wisdom to make right choices
• ability to form intimate relationships
• respect for authority
• skills to solve problems
• sense of humour
• ability to focus on goals
• honesty, integrity
• healthy sexuality
• sense of responsibility
• desire to learn
Once you know your objectives, you can set about figuring out how to achieve them. Remember, your child is not a blank slate on which you write your wishes. Your child’s personality is guided, not formed, by you and other significant persons. You must take the child’s individuality into account. Because children and parents have different temperaments and personalities, and families have different lifestyles, how parents guide their children will vary. Nevertheless, there are basic concepts that underlie all discipline, no matter what the characteristics of parent and child. The ten basic principles that follow should help you get started in thinking about how discipline will operate in your home. We’ll discuss each of these principles fully throughout the rest of the book.
1. Get Connected Early
Discipline is grounded on a healthy relationship between parent and child. To know how to discipline your child you must first know your child. This kind of knowledge resides deep in parents’ minds. You could call it intuition, but that term has a kind of mystique that confuses parents. (“How can I trust my intuition? I don’t even know if I have any!”) The term “connection” is easier to understand. With the high-touch parenting style called attachment parenting (to be explained in Chapter 2), you can build and strengthen this connection between you and your child, laying the foundation for discipline. Connected parents become their own experts on their own child, so they know what behaviour to expect as appropriate and how to convey their expectations. Connected children know what behaviour parents expect, and make an effort to behave this way because they want to please their parents. These parents and children together develop a style of discipline that works for them. In Chapter 2 we describe the tools for connecting with your baby and young child so that you can read your child’s behaviour and respond appropriately, and the two of you can bring out the best in each other. Throughout the rest of the book we help you stay connected to your child and show you how to reconnect if you had a shaky start in the early years of parenting.
Unconnected parents, unsure of what is going on in their child’s mind, may lack confidence in their own disciplinary skills, so they search for answers to their child’s behaviour from outside experts. They wander from method to method, groping for answers to problems that could have been prevented. If you and your child are having discipline problems and you feel there is a distance in your relationship, chances are the connection between you and your child needs some work. It’s never too late to improve that relationship, although the earlier you connect with your child the easier discipline will be. Getting connected and staying connected with your child is the foundation of discipline and the heart of the attachment approach.
2. Know Your Child
These are the three most useful words in discipline. Study your child. Know your child’s needs and capabilities at various ages. Your discipline techniques will be different at each stage because your child’s needs change. A temper tantrum in a two-year-old calls for a different response than it does in a four-year-old. In later chapters we will point out what behaviour is normal, what’s not, and what to do at each stage of a child’s development.
Know age-appropriate behaviour. Many conflicts arise when parents expect children to think
