Forget Time-Outs. Here's How To Discipline Your Kid With Positive Parenting

Rebecca Eanes is a popular parenting blogger and the founder of Positive-Parents.org. In this excerpt from her new book, Positive Parenting: An Essential Guide, she explains how to use "positive discipline" with your children.

Positive parenting is a philosophy rooted in connection. It isn’t just a method of discipline—but an entirely different way of relating to children that allows us to maintain a strong bond with them through the ages and stages of childhood while still raising kind and responsible people.

Many people question whether this is permissive parenting, and the answer is absolutely not. Permissive parents do not set and enforce limits; positive parents do. While I understand how challenging it can be at first to learn how to enforce limits without resorting to punishment, rest assured that an absence of punishment is not the same as an absence of discipline. In fact, the very reason I do not punish my children is because life’s messes cannot be fixed with a nose in the corner. Children will take responsibility for their actions by making amends, righting wrongs, solving the problems they create, and learning how to make better choices in the future.

All behavior is an indication of the internal state of the child. Misbehavior is a cue that there is an underlying need. When we assess what that need is and address it, often the misbehavior vanishes. This can be tricky with toddlers and preschoolers who cannot yet verbalize their needs or intentions, but just understanding that the behavior is a call for help rather than a calculated act of defiance of your authority can help you be compassionate and responsive.

Sometimes the need is easy to determine, such as hunger or tiredness, which can be cured with a meal or a nap. Other times, the behavior is signaling the need for a new boundary or to learn a skill, or possibly that there is something going on outside the home that your child is having trouble dealing with. For example, a toddler who has discovered the joy of jumping on the couch isn’t trying to misbehave. She’s playing. Even so, you probably don’t want her to jump on the couch, but when you tell her to stop, she doesn’t. This is signaling the need for a new boundary.

Undisciplined parents cannot effectively discipline children, so calm yourself down first. Move from emotionally reactive to cognitively responsive before you deal with the problem at hand.

Once calm yourself, help your child become calm. The goal is to engage his upstairs brain so that he is no longer emotionally reactive but able to reason. This could take two minutes or 20 minutes, depending on the child and her stage of development. Time-in—close contact with you and soothing exercises such as reading and drawing—is helpful to calm the brain. Some children may resist a time-in and prefer to be left alone. If this works to calm them, that’s good. We don’t want to force separation, as that can erode our connection, but giving a child the space he’s asking for is respecting his needs.

For children under 4, problem solving is too much to expect of them. The cognitive development to work through this process hasn’t happened yet, though certainly the parent can talk through it as he or she solves the problem, for modeling purposes. For young children, holding the limit by removing the child from the situation or removing the object that is being thrown, for example, is enough.