MM Discipline
Disciplining: the gentle way
TV programmes have made the combination of punishment and motivation a popular form of discipline. But here, Sarah Ockwell-Smith tells MM how this traditional approach can potentially damage your child
There is a misconception in our society that children learn best by being punished and shamed. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. If you want children to behave better, you have to make them feel better. Why do most ‘parenting experts’ only tell you what to do, leaving out the ‘Why?’ Surely that’s a more important place to start?
Time out or the naughty step (which are essentially one and the same) rely on punishing the child’s wrongdoings by excluding them from those they love
To enter the teaching profession, you need to study how
children learn long before you can ever begin to teach them. Yet as parents, we are thrown in at the deep end, holding a newborn baby in our arms without a shred of training. Taking some time to understand how children learn makes disciplining them infinitely easier. Society today takes the view that children who misbehave are
being deliberately naughty – that they plot and scheme to get what they want and make a conscious decision to behave in ways we dislike. But what if they behave undesirably, not deliberately, but because they cannot do anything else? Most common discipline methods focus on encouraging children to do and be better, so that they are motivated by rewards if they behave ‘well’ and punishments if they misbehave. This would seem sensible, but it makes one huge mistake. It presumes that the child is not motivated to be ‘good’ and that they have the capability to change their behaviour. But maybe they already have the motivation? Maybe they
already want to do better? And perhaps their brains – their capabilities – are holding them back? Are they behaving in a certain way simply because they cannot behave in any other? Mainstream discipline methods can achieve absolutely nothing here, except make the child feel worse. When a baby is born, they have 200 billion neurons and their
brain is around 30 per cent of the size of an adult’s. Each day it grows by around one and a half grams and, by the age of two, it will have reached 75 per cent of its full size. During the first three years of life, around seven hundred new neural connections, or synapses, are made in the brain every single second. These connections serve as the ‘wiring’ for the brain. By the time a child is three years old they have formed over one thousand trillion synapses. These connections - formed through a combination of genetics and life experience - are of great significance to the future brain architecture and have a significant impact in adulthood.
46 Modernmum
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