In my professional education, I have been blessed to have several remarkable mentors, beginning with Miki Holden (now head of  Family School in Los Olivos) and Eleanor Griffin at Eleanor’s Preschool in Berkeley ( I graduated from UCB).  The other major Berkeley influence was Dr. Thelma Harms, who was the Director of the UCB Child Development Center. She has become one of the giants in the field of early education. Many of my views about how to help children learn self-discipline and self-regulation started with her seminal ideas.

I have included below an edited version of an article she handed out to parents and teachers to give them some constructive ways of looking at discipline and some ideas to help children develop self-discipline.  I realize the writing is dated but the ideas are as good today as they were the day they were written. I hope you find wisdom in her words the way I have all of these years. It is a long article but I really believe that it is worth it.

Discipline- A Positive Approach

Dr. Thelma Harms

Edited, with occasional additions,  by Deborah Wyle

The very word “discipline” can carry with it a negative connotation.   I would like to attempt with you to re-define discipline in a positive way.  Discipline can be defined as the transformation of impulses into socially acceptable and communicable forms.  We need only think back to the vitality and the conviction that little babies show in every thing they do, whether it’s crying out of hunger, or smiling at a human face, to realize that every human being has tremendous impulses with him.  He has vitality and spontaneity and desires, but these need to be transformed into socially communicable, and I would say, socially acceptable forms in order for us to live constructively with one another.

In a way, discipline is a double-edged sword.  If we do away with the impulses in our children then we will end up with dull, dead, rigid people who know all the forms and practice all the forms, but who derive no satisfaction from any thing that they do.  They will be correct, but they will not be living human beings.  So, somehow we want to keep spontaneity, joy, and impulses alive in people.

Now the other edge of this sword is that if we have spontaneous, alive, impulses in our children whose behavior is not constructive, and does not add to society; if we let children grow up so that they cannot express themselves in way that are acceptable to other people, then we have the destructive side of impulsivity: we have children with severe behavior problems.

We parents have to devise a way of reaching our goals with our children so that we keep alive in them their impulsivity, but we also help them to develop socially acceptable forms of behavior. Now I am a mother and I know that you cannot possibly follow your best intentions all day, everyday ay. What I am going to suggest to you are ideas that I have found helpful myself in working with children, and I might say “in raising myself as a parent,” and I hope that some of these ideas also prove helpful to you.  I have  five ideas to share with you.

First of all, in the day to day living with a child, don’t underestimate your value as a behavior model. I think this is the main teaching tool that a parent has.  You are a behavior model.  Our children are watching us, they know what our feelings are, as well as what our intentions are and they are learning a great deal about how human beings behave from the way we behave, towards them, towards over selves, and towards other people.

If a mother comes in and finds her three year old annoying his baby brother and she says, “I told you not to do this,” and slaps his hand, she may think; “There, that will teach him not to hit his baby brother”. But is this mother really teaching her child; what has this child really learned about behavior?  He learned two things; my mother is bigger than I am, when she gets angry, she hits me.  Therefore, hitting is a perfectly good way to show that you are angry or that you disapprove of something.

The second thing he learned is; my mother does not want me to hit my baby brother.  He is learning this negative prohibition, but he is not learning what his mother really wants him to do with his baby brother, which is to like him; to be a human being with him.  He is not learning this because the mother herself has used physical punishment, she has been disapproving, and she has presented a model of behavior, which if followed by the child, would not be approved by the mother.

Even when we punish children, we are models of behavior and as we do unto them they will do unto others.  We want to be models of constructive ways of coping with life.  We all get angry. If the parent is a hostile parent, the child will likely be a hostile child.  We are models of behavior and sometimes we have to look into ourselves and find out whether we ourselves have to learn to cope with anger in constructive ways.

A second idea about the day-to-day living with children is that a parent re-enforces what the child does through giving it attention. Another very valuable teaching tool you have is your attention.  When a baby “coos” and “goos” there is something about this that delights us and we “coo” and “goo” back.  We don’t think about  it, but we are helping that child learn to speak.  We “coo” and “goo” to him, he “coos” and “goos” back to us, he says “dada” and immediately we say, “Dear, he called for you this morning, he said dada.”  Maybe in a few weeks the mother will have responded enough to this word so that when the child says “dada” he means a particular person.

Attention re-enforces behavior, it gives children a reason for doing the same thing again.  Now whether the attention is positive attention (like appreciation or interest), or whether it is negative attention (like spanking or an angry face), doesn’t make much difference.  Any kind of attention that we give the child re-enforces his behavior.  If you want behavior to disappear, you ignore it or you remove the child from your attention. Read More | CommentsTweet