9780345548047|excerpt

Siegel / NO-DRAMA DISCIPLINE

Chapter 1

ReTHINKING Discipline

Here are some actual statements we’ve heard from parents we’ve worked with. Do any of them resonate with you?

Do these comments sound familiar? So many parents feel like this. They want to handle things well when their kids are struggling to do the right thing, but more often than not, they end up simply reacting to a situation, rather than working from a clear set of principles and strategies. They shift into autopilot and give up control of their more intentional parenting decisions.

Autopilot may be a great tool when you’re flying a plane. Just flip the switch, sit back and relax, and let the computer take you where it’s been preprogrammed to go. But when it comes to disciplining children, working from a preprogrammed autopilot isn’t so great. It can fly us straight into whatever dark and stormy cloud bank is looming, meaning parents and kids alike are in for a bumpy ride.

Instead of being reactive, we want to be responsive to our kids. We want to be intentional and make conscious decisions based on principles we’ve thought about and agreed on beforehand. Being intentional means considering various options and then choosing the one that engages a thoughtful approach toward our intended outcomes. For No-­Drama Discipline, this means the short-­term external outcome of behavioral boundaries and structure and the long-­ term internal outcome of teaching life skills.

Let’s say, for example, your four-­year-­old hits you. Maybe he’s angry because you told him you needed to finish an email before you could play Legos with him, and he responded by slapping you on the back. (It’s always surprising, isn’t it, that a person that small can inflict so much pain?)

What do you do? If you’re on autopilot, not working from a specific philosophy for how to handle misbehavior, you might simply react immediately without much reflection or intention. Maybe you’d grab him, possibly harder than you should, and tell him through clenched teeth, “Hitting is not OK!” Then you might give him some sort of consequence, maybe marching him to his room for a time-­out.

Is this the worst possible parental reaction? No, it’s not. But could it be better? Definitely. What’s needed is a clear understanding of what you actually want to accomplish when your child misbehaves.

That’s the overall goal of this chapter, to help you understand the importance of working from an intentional philosophy and having a clear and consistent strategy for responding to misbehavior. As we said in the introduction, the dual goals of discipline are to promote good external behavior in the short term and build the internal structure of the brain for better behavior and relationship skills in the long term. Keep in mind that discipline is ultimately about teaching. So when you clench your teeth, spit out a rule, and give a consequence, is that going to be effective in teaching your child about hitting?

Well, yes and no. It might achieve the short-­term effect of getting him not to hit you. Fear and punishment can be effective in the moment, but they don’t work over the long term. And are fear, punishment, and drama really what we want to use as primary motivators of our children? If so, we teach that power and control are the best tools to get others to do what we want them to do.

Again, it’s completely normal to just react when we get angry, especially when someone inflicts physical or emotional pain on us. But there are better responses, responses that can achieve the same short-­term goal of reducing the likelihood of the unwanted behavior in the future, while also building skills. So rather than just fearing your response and inhibiting an impulse in the future, your child will undergo a learning experience that creates an internal skill beyond simply an association of fear. And all of this learning can occur while reducing the drama in the interaction and strengthening your connection with your child.

Let’s talk about how you can respond to make discipline less of a fear-­creating reaction and more of a skill-­building response on your part.

The Three Questions: Why? What? How?

Before you respond to misbehavior, take a moment to ask yourself three simple questions:

1. Why did my child act this way? In our anger, our answer might be “Because he’s a spoiled brat” or “Because he’s trying to push my buttons!” But when we approach with curiosity instead of assumptions, looking deeper at what’s going on behind a particular misbehavior, we can often understand that our child was trying to express or attempt something but simply didn’t handle it appropriately. If we understand this, we ourselves can respond more effectively—­and compassionately.

2. What lesson do I want to teach in this moment? Again, the goal of discipline isn’t to give a consequence. We want to teach a lesson—­whether it’s about self-­control, the importance of sharing, acting responsibly, or anything else.

3. How can I best teach this lesson? Considering a child’s age and developmental stage, along with the context of the situation (did he realize the bullhorn was switched on before he raised it to the dog’s ear?), how can we most effectively communicate what we want to get across? Too often, we respond to misbehavior as if consequences were the goal of discipline. Sometimes natural consequences result from a child’s decision, and the lesson is taught without our needing to do much. But there are usually more effective and loving ways to help our kids understand what we’re trying to communicate than to immediately hand out one-­size-­fits-­all consequences.

By asking ourselves these three questions—­why, what, and how—­when our children do something we don’t like, we can more easily shift out of autopilot mode. That means we’ll be much more likely to respond in a way that’s effective in stopping the behavior in the short term while also teaching bigger, long-­lasting life lessons and skills that build character and prepare kids for making good decisions in the future.

Let’s look more closely at how these three questions might help us respond to the four-­year-­old who slaps you while you’re emailing. When you hear the smack and feel the tiny, hand-­shaped imprint of pain on your back, it may take you a moment to calm down and avoid simply reacting. It’s not always easy, is it? In fact, our brains are programmed to interpret physical pain as a threat, which activates the neural circuitry that can make us more reactive and put us in a “fight” mode. So it takes some effort, sometimes intense effort, to maintain control and practice No-­Drama Discipline. We have to override our primitive reactive brain when this happens. Not easy. (By the way, this gets much harder to do if we’re sleep deprived, hungry, overwhelmed, or not prioritizing self-­care.) This pause between reactive and responsive is the beginning of choice, intention, and skillfulness as a parent.

So as quickly as possible, you want to try to pause and ask yourself the three questions. Then you can see much more clearly what’s going on in your interaction with your child. Every situation is different and depends on many different factors, but the answers to the questions might look something like this:

1. Why did my child act this way? He hit you because he wanted your attention and wasn’t getting it. Sounds pretty typical for a four-­year-­old, doesn’t it? Desirable? No. Developmentally appropriate? Absolutely. It’s hard for a child this age to wait, and big feelings surfaced, making it even harder. He’s not yet old enough to consistently calm himself effectively or quickly enough to prevent acting out. You wish he’d just soothe himself and with composure declare, “Mom, I’m feeling frustrated that you’re asking me to keep waiting, and I’m having a strong, aggressive impulse to hit you right now—­but I have chosen not to and am using my words instead.” But that’s not going to happen. (It would be pretty funny if it did.) In that moment, hitting is your son’s default strategy for expressing his big feelings of frustration and impatience, and he needs some time and skill-­building practice to learn how to handle both delaying gratification and appropriately managing anger. That’s why he hit you.

That feels much less personal, doesn’t it? Our kids don’t usually lash out at us because they’re simply rude, or because we’re failures as parents. They usually lash out because they don’t yet have the capacity to regulate their emotional states and control their impulses. And they feel safe enough with us to know that they won’t lose our love, even when they’re at their worst. In fact, when a four-­year-­old doesn’t hit and acts “perfect” all the time, we have concerns about the child’s bond with his parent. When children are securely attached to their parents, they feel safe enough to test that relationship. In other words, your child’s misbehavior is often a sign of his trust and safety with you. Many parents notice that their children “save it all up for them,” behaving much better at school or with other adults than they do at home. This is why. These flare-­ups are often signs of safety and trust, rather than just some form of rebellion.

2. What lesson do I want to teach in this moment? The lesson is not that misbehavior merits a consequence, but that there are better ways of getting your attention and managing his anger than resorting to violence. You want him to learn that hitting isn’t OK, and that there are lots of appropriate ways to express his big feelings.

3. How can I best teach this lesson? While giving him a time-­out or some other unrelated consequence might or might not make your son think twice next time about hitting, there’s a better alternative. What if you connected...