Discipline

Society revolves around rules and so does life at home. Rules help a child to feel secure and know what is expected of them. Implementing the rules helps the child to define boundaries and become self secure.

Is it too young to start disciplining? 

We believe that our son needs limits and there are things we are not comfortable with him doing. One big example is him pulling our hair or pinching our faces. This is unacceptable to us and even though he doesn’t mean to hurt us we believe we should be teaching him that this is not acceptable for us. We tell him not to do that and then show him how to be gentle and give lots of praise. He has taken this on board very well and is now good at touching our faces gently and we make up a game where we say ‘beeb’ when he touches our noses and he has a giggle. It’s a very relaxed way of giving him the limits of how to touch us.

When he continues to be too rough we tell him that if he does it again we will put him on the floor. He usually repeats the roughness so we place him on the floor. Almost every time he cries immediately so we pick him up and tell him he must say sorry then show him how to be gentle again. He has responded quickly to this method and is improving every day. There is a pattern to his behavior and we find he is particularly rough when he is tired so we try to avoid the situation happening as it is always difficult to implement discipline when he is too tired. That said, if he does hurt us we carry out our discipline method as consistency is key to helping him know that the boundaries are firm.

We always discuss what method we will take with him before a situation arises so we can both implement discipline smoothly and so that he isn’t confused by us setting two different sets of limits. It is very important to discuss these things away from him so that we always present a united front otherwise he will know when one of us doesn’t really mind something and try to push this boundary further.