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"Children are the only
people in this society anybody is allowed to hit. All
the rest of us are legally protected."
**from the article "Physical
Punishment in the Home" by Penelope Leach.
What is gentle discipline?
It
can mean different things to different people. In
general it is used to refer to a method of parenting
that is nonpunitive, both physically and emotionally.
This does NOT mean permissive. There is a wealth of
resources available to parents who choose to gently
discipline their children that does not include
spanking, slapping, punitive time-outs, verbal
tongue-lashings and other such forms of discipline.
There is also a wealth of research supporting gentle or
"positive" discipline.
Parents who choose "gentle discipline" or
"positive discipline", do not spank, but
instead will use things like distraction (for toddlers)
and natural and logical consequences (for older
children). If they do use "time-outs", they tend to use
them in a nonpunitive way--a break, away from a
situation where the child has lost control of themselves
and need to take a couple minutes to get control again.
Generally the parent will participate in this "positive
time-out" with the child, as opposed to sending them
away to "think about what they did" or to punish them.
Natural consequences and logical consequences
are also ways that followers of gentle discipline teach
their children appropriate behavior. Natural
consequences allows the child to experience what
naturally happens as a result of their actions...for
example, your child refuses to put away a favorite toy
that is lying in the driveway behind the family car and
Dad drives over it on his way to work the next day, not
knowing it was there. The child then remembers to put
toys away in the future. Obviously there are some
natural consequences that no parent would (or should)
follow through on, such as the natural consequence of
playing in the street.
Logical consequences are logically related to the
offense. An example would be that your child again
refuses to put away a certain toy, and is given a
warning that either they put it away or you, the parent,
will put it up for a set amount of time. (Perhaps store
it in a closet for a week.) The child doesn't put away
the toy and it gets put away and they learn to put
things away when asked. A consequence that would NOT be
logically linked to the offense would be something like
taking away tv priviledges for not picking up the toy.
Its important to note here that no one is trying to say
there is an EASY way to discipline, or that there is a
wrong or right way to discipline. Every child and every
parent and every family is different and will need to
find their own mixture of discipline techniques that
work for them. There is, however, a wealth of info and
research out there on how punitive styles of parenting
simply don't work in the long run, and/or should be used
very sparingly because of detrimental effects.
Check out these informative links on gentle (positive)
styles of discipline.
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