While there is room for myriad parenting philosophies from fairly authoritarian to laissez faire, an area I see parents struggle is in coming up with consequences for negative behaviors.
Research suggests that an engaged and loving relationship between parents and kids, backed up by firmly held limits, correlates with good self-esteem and positive social relatedness in children. But when it comes to being “firm,” sometimes we parents are at a loss as to what to actually do when the kids pull on their wolf suits and get up to all sorts of mischief as does Max in Where The Wild Things Are.
One way to engage this issue is to contemplate the exact nature of any specific behavior our child might do that raises the question of what we ought to do in the way of discipline, consequences or teaching. In other words, when your kid is “bad,” what is it that they do, and how might it go over in the big bad world if they were to grow up with out learning better?
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