September 1995

The Nature of Positive Discipline

Parents who use positive discipline respect, nurture, and support their children. Children feel free to share ideas and feelings, make choices, and ask questions. There are many positive discipline techniques parents can consider. Some of these include:

ù Give positive statements -- "Look how well you're cutting those apples!"

ù Ask questions -- "What should we do next?"

ù Use appropriate body language -- nod, smile, and look directly at children.

ù Lower your body position -- bend, kneel, or sit at children's levels.

ù Restructure the environment -- remove objects that invite misbehavior.

ù Direct behavior -- "Here's a sponge so we can wipe the table."

ù Redirect behavior -- Lindsay bounces the basketball around the family room. "You can bounce your basketball outside on the sidewalk."

ù Distract -- Kevin rolls his tricycle into the rose bush. "You can ride with me down to the mailbox."

ù Provide choices -- "Should we put the blue blocks or the yellow blocks away first?"

ù Encourage children's attempts -- While dusting the furniture, Peter shakes the dust cloth around the dusted room."I can see you dusted the piano and chairs. They look wonderful."

ù Demonstrate desirable behaviors -- Parents wash hands with soap and water before meals, just as they ask their children to do.

ù Ignore undesirable behaviors -- Jessica makes funny faces while eating dinner. Mom and Dad do not respond.

ù Set specific limits -- Sam throws cars across the living room. Dad shows Sam where to play with the cars. Sam continues to throw cars. Dad directs Sam to put the cars away.

ù Take a break -- Dad has Sam take a break for several minutes in an area that is safe and boring. Afterwards, Dad directs Sam to pick up the cars and play with them in the car area.

Source: Doescher, S., Burt, L., You, Your Child, and Positive Discipline. EC 1452. Oregon State University Extension Service, March, 1995.

Negative Discipline

Some parents use negative discipline approaches to control their children's behavior. This may result in children who are angry and aggressive or have low self-esteem. Negative strategies include:

ù Commands -- "Go over there and sit down!"

ù Forbidding statements -- "Don't touch that!" or "Don't do that!"

ù Criticizing statements -- "Oh no, you're going to spill that!"

ù Belittling statements -- "When will you ever learn to get ready for bed on time?"

ù Threatening statements -- "If you don't eat right now, you'll be in more trouble than you know!"

ù Unreasonable punishment -- "Go to your room for the whole day!"

ù Explosive anger -- Emotional and verbal expressions of feelings.

There are various positive ways to deal with anger and frustration. Some parents tell their children, "I need a moment to calm down, I'm very angry right now." Others cool down by leaving the room for a few minutes. Some parents describe their feelings to their children to help them understand what annoys them.

Source: Doescher, S., Burt, L., You, Your Child, and Positive Discipline. EC 1452. Oregon State University Extension Service, March, 1995.

Teens and Stealing

A new study measuring moral development in adolescents found that teens were deficient in understanding why they shouldn't steal. Researchers found that non-delinquent teens generally scored well on a test that measured their moral judgment concerning values such as telling the truth, keeping promises, saving a life and helping their parents. But the test showed that teens had relatively immature or self-serving reasons for why stealing is wrong. For example, they said that you shouldn't steal because you might get caught and punished.

The study involved 163 non-delinquent teenagers from a suburban public school; 89 incarcerated male delinquents; and 71 incarcerated female delinquents. All of the teens completed the short form of the Sociomoral Reflection Measure, the investigators' test for measuring moral reasoning. As expected, delinquents showed evidence of lower moral reasoning than non-delinquents. This difference remained even after the delinquents' lower socioeconomic status and verbal intelligence were taken into account.

Female non-delinquents showed the highest levels of moral reasoning, followed by male non-delinquents, female delinquents and then male delinquents. The fact that girls generally had a more developed sense of moral reasoning than boys is not surprising because girls also develop faster than boys in other cognitive areas, as well as physically. More than 90 percent of the teens--both delinquents and non-delinquents--rated the moral values discussed in the study as important, a finding the researchers called "a ray of hope." They recommend that moral education programs in schools emphasize respect for property.

Source: Greg, V. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 40(4): 538-553, 1994.

Children Who Tease

Anyone who's ever been to a school playground during recess knows how mean children can be. But the concept of "mean" changes as children get older, says a child psychiatrist, and by adolescence teasing turns into more symbolic forms that can be rejected by the victim.

First-graders, for the most part, engage in physically hurtful teasing, such as tying a classmate's shoelaces together, according to Theodore R. Warm, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, who asked 250 children and adolescents about teasing. By sixth grade, hurtful teasing is replaced by what Warm calls mean teasing--calling a burn victim ugly, for example. But as young people move into adolescence, their teasing gets more sophisticated and symbolic.

In first grade, actions speak louder than words. You can't really use verbal teasing when you're that young.

By sixth grade, words are as good as actions. These children take words very concretely: it doesn't make any difference whether the victim of teasing is disfigured or not. The words are taken as much as reality.

Adolescents discover the truth of the adage"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

By 11th grade, symbolic teasing accounts for about 80 percent of the teasing. "They start to realize that the words are only symbols of harassment, and if you don't accept that symbol as having authenticity, you can then overlook it and not get upset by it."

The young people in the study, especially as they got older, usually coped with being teased on their own. About a fourth of the first-graders said they would tell their teacher or parent, but by third grade, 90 percent say they handle teasing themselves. An overwhelming 95 percent of sixth-graders say the same thing. But, students who handled teasing by themselves either responded by retaliating against or ignoring the teaser. Retaliation was a little--but not much--higher than ignoring.

Teasing is an inevitable part of growing up, and it seems that kids are adept at handling it on their own, but when teasing gets out of hand, it can lead to problems. Warm says that it is sometimes appropriate for adults to intervene, particularly among prepubertal children. "When other kids use a cruel, symbolic teasing, an older person would be able to see through it, but the latency kids are stuck in a concrete operation and their cognitive capacities haven't matured enough so that they can understand the symbolism of it," Warm says. "The word is the same thing as having it. If you call somebody fat, it's the same as being fat. All of us who work--or have our own kids--know how miserable kids can be."