Discipline for Parents. How to be a Better Child.

Please note, by far I do not support any form of violence or abuse of kids.  Please do not get the impression by reading this that I do, or that I regularly yell at my kids.  There is joke and  hyperbolic content in my words, tongue in cheek.  Thank you. 

Just going to tell you that lately I have been reading a lot of parenting blogs.  How to be a fine parent.  How to be a better Dad.  I have a favorite link on the side of all my posts for instance, this blog: MichaelByronSmith: Helping Fathers to be Dads  I have much respect for the advice and support and help, don't get me wrong, all of them in fact, I wouldn't have a link for a blog if I didn't like it.  Being a good parent is a learned job, it doesn't come by heredity or automatically.  No it doesn`t. 

But... 

One of these girls should be writing blogs
Not sunning themselves in the English rain

I think something is missing.  Or there is an opportunity for a new niche of blogs.  

Let me explain.  

In many of these blogs they teach you, or write about staying calm and getting away from stress parenting and most of all yelling at our kids.  

I agree with that.  

To think of how it used to be, and worse, for centuries and centuries, it can make me cry.  I mean, even just one generation ago it was quite normal for kids to be hit or even whipped.  That probably didn't even go out till I was a kid, and it may have been around just ten or twenty years earlier in the 1950s.  I can fathom that even now a lot of kids are getting whipped in places in the world.  That, I must say, is very very sad for me.  It shouldn't be like that.  

In the US, they seem to be moving even further and trying to move parents away from yelling at their kids.  I can agree with this too.  Yelling at your kids only teaches them that yelling is OK and they will mimic your actions and may start yelling at their friends, or whomever.  Worse yet, they may grow up to yell at their kids.  A cycle of wrong parenting continued.  I am against the yelling, even though, it may be very hard to change, admittedly.  

Fathers in particular will find this new rule especially difficult to unwind and reject.  Naturally yelling may still be one of fathers methods of discipline, though we have evolved to not include hitting anymore..... hopefully.  

So I was reading a blog about a positive method of discipline, not punishment, not yelling, but teaching and education (I didn't need to say both those words, they are pretty much synonyms).  In fact the word discipline comes from the Latin word disciplina, which means educate and of course a disciple is a learner of a teacher.  Discipline is not punishment, there should be no yelling.  

I was thinking about this a lot, but all that popped into my head while reading is all the yelling that goes on in our household.  I was asking myself, how can this change?  How can we teach our six year old to stop yelling at her parents constantly.   

Hmmm.  

I thought about how I could turn around the lesson of the blog and give that information to my six year old.  Here is the blog and here is how I might change it on a couple of the points. 

1. The core of positive discipline: There are no bad kids, just bad behavior.  Changes to, There are no bad parents just bad behavior.  

"Look my daughter you have to realize that when there is a bag of chocolates sitting out over night, your father, a confirmed chocoholic belonging to chocoholics anonymous, is going to nab one chocolate when he is up late at night and the chocolate is calling him.  Though in earlier days or years, the whole bag would be gone.  And please don't yell at me for sitting on your bed, I really just wanted to kiss you good night and it is hard to do so without putting some part of my body on your just made bed. Yes, I realize you like it tucked in and straightened, but that is no reason to give daddy a yelling.  It was just bad behavior on my part in wanting to kiss you good night.  Wont happen again.  And I am truly sorry for throwing away that little tiny crumpled up piece of paper which was sitting on the floor in the hallway, I had no idea it was part of your scrap paper collection.  I thought it was a discarded piece of cardboard box from the chocolate box which should be thrown out.  I know I know, bad behavior on my part.  But please stop yelling at me at the top of your lungs about it."  

2. Instead of pointing out what the child did wrong, show the child how to set things right.  Becomes, instead of yelling at daddy, tell him how he can set things right.  For example, you the parent could say “That was not a good choice, we don’t yell at daddy for everything. Do you want to say sorry and make daddy feel better?”  

3. Whenever possible, offer choices.  After offering empathy, you can take it to the next level by offering her some choices. Choices give your child a sense of control. Not only is she not “bad”, instead of being “punished” she is given control… Here are some of the choices you can give her, I suggest.  "Now honey, after you have decided that yelling at daddy is not the best answer, you can make it up by being extra nice.  For example, you can clean out the bathroom toilet which is my job, but it hasn't been done in two weeks.  Or you can go buy me a bag of potato chips or chocolates so I have my own dessert instead of taking yours.  Or you can just stop being a mean, nasty kid and stop yelling and being loud and apologize and stop your yelling because it s driving me crazy and sometime I m just going to Pow Alice, right in the kisser and.... 

whoa whoa whoa,  that isn't one of the options, that is a line from the TV show the Honeymooners.  I just need a time out or time in, whatever the case and relax now.  Breathe easily, count to ten, better make that one hundred.  Lets calm down everybody.  

I really learned a lot from that post on that blog site.  I must disclose I did plagiarize some of the text from that post to my post.  For the full text and educational experience, I give you the link once again here. And please use education and not punishment the next time you are disciplining.

But I have to add at the end, that I am scouring the web for some blog written by a three to six year old on better understanding toward their parents and using education with parents instead of yelling at them all the time. 

I still haven`t found what I`m looking for.  Maybe if we all look together.... we still won`t find it. Obviously an opportunity there for some aspiring three year old.

In the end, my six year old told me to go to the corner and sit on this chair as I had been a bad Daddy.