calling M. Foucault, M. Foucault come in please

[metaphortunate]

Mr. E had a visit with a friend of his this week. Said friend has kids older than the Junebug, and as they were talking shop, as parents will do, the friend asked if we had any thoughts on discipline. Because at this point, apparently it is hard to take the kids over to anyone's houses because they do not hear the word "no" and that turns out to not be very much fun.

This is not a situation I want to find myself in four years from now. But I don't really know what to do about it. This is one reason I've loved the baby stage: you don't have to discipline a baby. Babies do what they gotta do. Older kids, I know you have to actually train and stuff - but I have no idea how.

Parents of kids older than babies - what have you done about discipline? Has it worked? Did you try different things? What did you start with, and when did you start, and how has your approach changed as the kids have gotten older?

I'm turning on anonymous comments on this one.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

+1-ing avoiding emotional pile-ons as much as possible, and verbalizing. When I feel I'm about to lose it, I say, "This is not doing us any good," plus whatever pertains--most recently, "Mama can't hold you right now because you hit me; you sit by yourself for two minutes," and then I stand up and move away. (Generally not for exactly two minutes, yet, though she understands the digital timer on the microwave.) Narrating things from before she could understand all the words/concepts has been useful for us because it means she expects both narrative and conversation, and increasingly, she participates by saying what she wants instead of just crying in frustration. Sometimes it's not what I thought she wanted, and it's something she can have, which is nice....

+1 especially to the importance of being consistent. I'm able to guess a little in advance what some issues will be, discuss them with darkforge, and get consensus that we can implement together, but for some things inevitably we're surprised, and whoever is on the spot has to implement a hopefully not impossible-to-uphold policy and stick to it. And it seems simpler already (~20 months) to assert that we need to do some unwanted things because they're right, they're just what we do, than to make things an if-then seesaw. I try to emphasize positive conceptualizations ("let's clean up these blocks together before we eat") instead of letting them flip negative ("can't eat till the floor's clean").

[khedron]

Narrating things from before she could understand all the words/concepts has been useful for us because it means she expects both narrative and conversation, and increasingly, she participates by saying what she wants instead of just crying in frustration. Sometimes it's not what I thought she wanted, and it's something she can have, which is nice....

Yes, to this & more. My wife is especially good at maintaining the flow of narrative, and I think it's paying off now that the baby is a toddler and it's very much a give-and-take.