How To Discipline Your Child Without Kickbacks

Read about 5 effective ways of disciplining your child without fuelling resentment...

How to discipline your child without kickbacks

We all love our kids and many of us say that having a child is the best thing that has ever happened to us.

But it's when your child decides to test the envelope of his boundaries and you throw an adult version of your child's tantrum, that this statement is turned on its head!

If this is a situation you face regularly when you discipline your child, and meeting fire with fire is not making any head way, then it might be best to take a step back and re-think your strategy.

Tackle your child's discipline issues by thinking outside the box. The last thing that your child will expect is communication, and you dealing with his demands and tantrums in a neutral and unemotional approach.

By dealing with your child's tantrums in a calm manner, you can make him recognize that he has pushed the wrong buttons. The best part is that your child will not breed resentment against you for disciplining him.

Here are 5 easy steps to discipline your child without making him resent you:

1. From no discipline to responsibility

Approach the situation with a firm and fair approach. Sit them down, ask them calmly why they did the very thing that now puts them in their current predicament. Make them realize there is a loop to their indiscipline: Indiscipline invokes an action, an action requires dealing with, and having dealt with it, move on. Again communication is the key. Make them think, realize, and engender responsible actions and responsibility in them for the future.

2. Don’t yell – delivery is key

I find that screaming till you are blue in the face is a one-way highway to a heart attack. Simply don’t yell as it can have a negative effect on both of you, and can harm your child's self-esteem. Keeping the voice flat and neutral delivers the idea of discipline in an indifferent approach. More tips on how to discipline your child on the next page...

3. Don’t use hand gestures

For a child who has just crossed the line, being met with a screaming face and whirling hands will either breed fascination for them to do it again or make them recoil in horror. So cut out the finger pointing. For me, it’s wasted energy.

Instead, what you need are focus and control when trying to discipline your child, and you’ll hit home quicker and smoother without the hand displays.

4. Work together

It is all too easy to get sucked into a power struggle where the only winner is a heightened state of tension. So try the ‘no win, we all win’ approach.

Simply go into the battle without the aim of winning the upper hand. Once you have handled the indiscipline and the action, look at a solution to work together and offer a balanced approach to working through any grievances.

Offer them choices as the olive branch to move on as it dawns on them that in working together as a team, they can get devolved responsibility and, therefore, they feel they will have some control over their future actions.

5. Keep an 'open door’ policy

Reassuring a child is just as important as providing them with a stable environment. Our children thrived even through their tricky times because they were able to come to us for advice.

The ‘open door’ policy in which you as a parent realize your own actions will enable your child to grow without a chip on their shoulders.

These steps are sure to get the 'D' back in to discipline in no time. Tell us if these tips helped and worked for you at home.

We'd also love to hear about how you discipline you child at home -- do leave us a comment.