Tag disobedience
Why Kids Explode and What to Do About It
Just like us, our kids sometimes react angrily when something important to them feels attacked. First expressions of anger are almost always aggressive. As kids get old enough to express themselves, the aggression becomes words and actions. One day I…
A Parenting Fairy Tale…
Once upon a time, near a woods far away, there was a family named the Scrumpkins. Bingle (the dad) and Kalinda (the mom) were fearful of what might happen to their children if they explored the dark, foreboding woods behind…
An Often Overlooked Motivator of Good Behavior…
Many parents think that some sort of painful punishment is the best motivator for kids to improve their behavior. Other parents “focus on the positive” and offer rewards when kids do well. Research about what motivates workers to do well reveals…
5 Ways to Communicate Love No Matter What (Even in Misbehavior!)
This is part of a series on “Discipline that Connects®: Four Powerful Messages All Kids Long to Hear”. Communicating “love no matter what” when kids misbehave can seem like a tall order. But when these five simple changes come from…
The Five Powerful Results of Empathy
There is no more important time for kids to know they're loved than when they misbehave. If the love message misses them then, they may think that love is conditional. People who believe that tend to rise and fall with their performance and compromise themselves for approval. Not what we want for our kids. So communicate love through empathy!
The Most Important Time to Love Your Child
What might happen if every time we disciplined our children we remembered this powerful message of God's love for us: "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!" (1 John 3:1).
What If We’re Doing It All Backwards?
Jeni wants her ten-year-old, Timmy, to be more obedient and responsible. What parent doesn’t want this? So when Timmy disobeys, and doesn’t take responsibility to clean up the kitchen as assigned on his chore chart, she enters the all too common battle of wills to get him to do his job.
Teenagers, Sass, and Life That Is Truly Life
“Are you going to help me or not?” I snapped at Daniel, our fifteen year-old-son. He’d been asking for the past hour to go to a friend’s house. I kept dodging his request while also badgering him to enlist his…
One of Our Biggest Parenting Mistakes…
One of our biggest parenting mistakes is to try to get kids to behave right for the wrong reasons. It’s a good thing to want our kids to behave responsibly and to internalize the value of responsibility, but parents tend…
What’s Your Child Really Saying?
It was the first warm day of spring in Minnesota, which usually means MUD. The ground was still soggy from the snow melt, but the air was clean and fresh and the flowers were just beginning to peek through the soil. I was outside with two of our three kids...