Fatherhood

Shaping your child’s behaviour

Be a Positive Model for your Child 

  • Children learn from what they see you do. Behave in ways you want your child to behave. When you overcome challenges, solve problems and handle conflicts in positive ways, you are modelling positive behaviour and making them feel safe and secure in taking the same actions in future. 
  • Showing warmth and love to both daughters and sons builds their confidence and self- esteem. Your child will learn to consistently value themselves if you consistently value them. 
  • Respecting and appreciating your partner shows your children what to expect of future relationships. It teaches your child what behaviour is acceptable and desirable in a life partnership. 
  • Teach your child to understand and manage feelings. One of the best ways is to show how you manage your own feelings well.  
  • Model self-control to your child by staying calm when they are upset or get out of control.5 
  • Slow down before you react to a situation. Do your best to demonstrate to your child that mature actions should be based on thinking and values, not just an immediate response to an emotion. 
  • Label your child’s feelings. This helps them learn to understand themselves. For example, explain ‘you are crying and rubbing your eyes. I think you are feeling tired.’6 
  • Show that men have feelings too. Label your own feelings. Talk about feelings, teach children that feelings are very important for you, and that it is OK to express them in safe and positive ways. 
  • Separate feelings from criticisms of your child. Try using ‘I’ instead of ‘You’ statements wherever possible. Instead of saying ‘you are driving me crazy right now’ try to express your actual feelings: ‘I am really frustrated right now.’ Instead of saying ‘you’re a bad boy/girl’, say ‘I think that you’re really angry. Let’s talk about it.’7 

Communication 

  • Talk about what you are doing and explain the reasoning behind why you are doing things in a particular way. 
  • Think about how your child could help you or be involved with everyday activities, rather than just being a spectator. 
  • Allow your child to make easy decisions to build their confidence and judgement. Over time increase from low-consequence decisions to more important ones. 
  • Pay full attention to your children when they talk.8 
  • If you are busy, make and honour a promise of listening to your child later. Arrange a time and quiet place to listen to your child.9 
  • Acknowledge what your children say.10
  • Show that you are interested in listening to what your child is saying. Establishing eye contact, not being distracted by other tasks, or talking about what they have told you are easy ways to demonstrate this. 
  • When possible, sit at the same level as your child instead of standing over them. 
  • Ask open-ended questions (which require your child to answer in detail and in their own words rather than questions which ask for a “Yes/No” answer. Open-ended questions are often “How, What, Why” type questions, such as: ‘how did it happen?’ or ‘how do you feel?’.11
  • Avoid criticising, teasing, ridiculing, or putting your child in an embarrassing position.12 
  • Your child needs to know they are loved, even when they have done something you do not approve of. For example, tell them ‘I don’t like that behaviour, but I do love you.’13
  • Let your child know if you’re about to go somewhere or change activities so they know what to expect. Predictability and consistency are very important for children to feel secure. 
  • Be generous in praising your child when they practice talking about their feelings or when they manage a difficult situation. For example, you can say: ‘Thanks for sharing with me how you feel. I am always here to listen and help.’  

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Read Transcript

Communicating with your children can be really hard.

Some of the things that I've learned is, as much as possible, be present.

We get busy, we get distracted.

There can be a lot of things going on, both generally in our lives, but also in and around our households.

But as much as possible, stop, pause, listen, engage. I've really had to teach myself that over time.

I used to think that multitasking was a thing.

It's not a thing. It doesn't work.

It doesn't work in any aspect of life, but it certainly doesn't work in communication with your kids.

And so I've often learned when my kids approach me to stop what I'm doing, assuming that's okay and appropriate, look at them, be present, engage them, understand, listen, and then respond.

And so be present is really important.

And also be calm.

That thing around, ensuring that you pause and respond and take time out if you need to.

Being calm in communication is really important as well, but also how you engage with them in terms of, I guess what I would call a power dynamic.

As adults, when you kind of think about us from a young child's perspective, we're big.

Like, we're really big.

And so ensuring that you try and get down to their level, kneeling or squatting, because you want to get down on their level, you can look them in the eye.

You can not feel threatening to them, and you can really find that it helps you engage with what they're doing and what they're saying.

Having a baby can be challenging and different, particularly for a dad.

You don't always often know what your role is in that relationship.

But kids really respond to their parents' voices.

And so just talk with them, just talk at them.

And I know that can sound or seem weird and awkward.

It is one of the few and only stages in their life where they can't talk back.

So that's probably a good thing, too.

But seriously, the more that you can engage your kids and talk with them, the more that they hear and know your voice.

I think it's a really beautiful and it's a really powerful thing.

Managing behaviour 

Encouraging children to develop independence from a young age is valued in Australia. Learning independence will help your child gain confidence, overcome challenges and setbacks, manage their own emotions, and better equip themselves to make good choices in the future. 

Developing independence requires practice. A necessary part of practice is making mistakes and learning from the consequences of your child’s choices – both the successes and failures.  

As your child grows out of infancy and starts to learn independence, one of the biggest challenges for parents is teaching appropriate behaviour. This includes how you and your partner give guidance, create learning opportunities, encourage desirable behaviour, and manage consequences of unacceptable behaviour.  

Teaching children behaviour is a complicated subject, and you will encounter a range of different styles and opinions on how parents should best accomplish this. Viewpoints can vary substantially between individual parents, different cultural backgrounds, and different generations within the same family. 

Discipline is a key aspect of this teaching. Discipline is the process through which parents create learning experiences about unacceptable behaviour. It helps keep children safe and provides corrective guidance for children on how to manage their own feelings, impulses, and actions across different social settings. The discipline strategies you use will depend on the child and their age. 

Discipline is not the same as punishment. Punishment is a penalty for past behaviour without developing useful skills for managing similar situations in future. Sometimes, the desire to inflict punishment stems from a parent's feelings of frustration. As a consequence, punishment is often mistakenly practiced instead of discipline. This can happen with parents from all cultural backgrounds. 

Discuss with your partner: 

  • What does discipline mean to you? 
  • How did your parents discipline you? 
  • Growing up, did discipline equal punishment or was it more like guidance? 

Discipline is a competence that new parents will need to learn, develop and practice. Talking about how you and your partner will discipline your child will help make your strategies more consistent. Inconsistent discipline confuses a child. If your family or community play a role in caring for your child, you should let them know what your discipline strategies are and what you expect of them in dealing with your child. This may be difficult for some family members to adjust to, but you can explain that consistency will help your child and that you would appreciate their support. 

Talk to your child about the consequences of their unacceptable behaviour and the positive effects of their desirable behaviour. Sometimes, children may seem to be deliberately disobedient but may simply not understand or appreciate the effects of their behaviour. Keep in mind that explaining consequences for discipline needs to be appropriate to their age and level of understanding.  

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Some behavioural teaching styles stress the importance of absolute obedience to parents or elders, such as lecturing children, or corporal (physical) punishment. An authoritarian style of parenting does not support a child’s development of creativity, thinking or independence – skills which will help them succeed later in life. It does not teach children to develop judgement or moderate their own behavior. Instead, it teaches children that they do not control their own actions and that only parents do. This approach is not recommended. 

Corporal (physical) punishment such as smacking may stop your child behaving in a certain way, but the change will be out of fear of the punishment, rather than understanding why the behavior warranted your punishment in the first place. It also does not help children learn the alternative behaviour that you would prefer. Physical punishment can also lead to your child copying violent behaviour, or developing challenging behaviours depicted as childhood disorders which include conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder in addition to anxiety and depression later on in life. 

When using corporal punishment, it is also possible that you will lose control and hurt your child, or cause unintentional serious injury constituting child abuse. Where inappropriate or unreasonable force has been used in punishing a child, criminal sanctions may apply.  

The law is different in each State and Territory. Corporal punishment is generally only considered acceptable as long as it is ‘reasonable’. Whether it is ‘reasonable’ or not will depend on the age and size of the child, the method of punishment, the child’s capacity for reasoning, and the seriousness of the harm caused. 

Corporal punishment is not recommended. 

Remember: there is a fine line between corporal punishment and physical abuse. Instead of using corporal punishment to manage your children’s behaviour, it is recommended that you use positive (non-physical) discipline. 

If any of these topics raise a strong emotional response for you, and you need to talk to someone, call: 

MensLine Australia: 1300 78 99 78 

Beyond Blue support service: 1300 22 46 36 

Lifeline: 13 11 14 

Read Transcript

With seven kids, we've learnt a lot about behaviour management, and we have a number of tips, but partly through getting things wrong more than getting it right sometimes.

One of those tips is really, I think, about ourselves as parents.

I think discipline and behaviour management is as much about self discipline.

What they see me do can have a really profound impact on them.

And then beyond that, I guess, discipline for us is really about boundaries, and it's about trying to help our kids make better choices, recognising that at some point, they need to be independent, functioning, healthy adults.

And if we're going to help them do that, then being punitive or directive or telling them how to live their lives rather than showing them how to navigate that for themselves is a really important distinction for us.

Discipline is about boundaries and is about good choices.

Punishment is about enforcing or controlling or hopefully not, but can be- and we've witnessed this- violent behaviours towards children that are that are damaging and actually don't serve their best interests.

For us, physical punishment is just never an option.

Smacking just actually doesn't work, in my opinion.

Not only is it wrong and possibly in many situations, illegal, it just doesn't work.

It's really difficult for anyone, but for kids, particularly at certain ages, to understand if you're going to use physical punishment, how is it that the hand that hits them is also the hand that reaches out and hugs them and embraces them?

And so we've found it's just not something that works.

It might feel like it works in the immediate, but it actually, over time, just causes greater problems than anything else.

 

Create a safe home 

  • Children require physical and emotional safety in their home environment. It is the foundation for healthy growth. With stability and support at home, children are better able to explore the world, take risks, recover from setbacks and overcome challenges.   
  • Both girls and boys need to grow up in a safe environment, where they are protected from danger and feel loved. 
  • Children must be adequately fed and clothed, be safe from harm, and be provided with care, attention and adequate supervision. Do not leave your children alone at home or in cars. As your child grows older, consider whether they are ready to be left at home alone. There are different laws about this in each state and territory.  
  • In addition to making sure your home is a safe place for your child to live protected from injuries and hazards, a safe home is an environment free from family violence. 
  • Regularly witnessing violent acts in the home negatively affects children and is regarded as child abuse. When children experience intense emotional stress, the development of their brains can be adversely affected. 
  • When a woman experiences intense emotional stress during pregnancy, the foetus’s brain development can also be adversely affected. This can impair the baby’s development.14 
  • Children who feel unsafe in the home can experience fear, anxiety, sleep difficulties, speech difficulties, stress-related illnesses, depression and poor school performance. They may also withdraw from people and events, and experience or display bullying, aggressive or destructive behaviours.15 

Read Transcript

It's really important that our kids understand that their home is a safe place.

And as much as we can do to ensure that it remains that way, we're absolutely committed to.

Having a safe and healthy home means a few things to me.

We actually have in the entryway to our household a canvas of the values of our house.

And we deliberately put it there because we want people who come into our house to see it.

But we also want to kind of remind ourselves about it every single day.

And it simply says this: 'in our home, we do generosity, honesty, patience, forgiveness, hugs and kisses, joy and gratitude, hope and faith, prayer and love.'

And so for me, I guess living or trying to live to those values is really sort of everything that a safe and healthy household is.

Any relationship over time is going to have some kind of conflict. And so how we manage that is really important.

Trying not to respond too quickly in certain situations, we often find it's important just to pause, find some kind of circuit breaker, whatever that looks like.

We can be prone to respond and react to certain situations.

And we've found over time that often our first reaction is not the best reaction.

So as much as we can breathe, pause, try and bring some calm to a situation.

Whether that's our own fault or our kids, we find is a really important mechanism in how we go about our lives.

So the mantra that we have in our household and we repeat this to ourselves as well as to our kids, is kind words, kind heart, gentle touch.

And so as much as possible, the words that we speak need to be kind both to each other and about each other.

It needs to come from a place of meaning well for each other in terms of having a kind heart about and for each other.

And the way that we physically interact with each other, whether it's our kids interacting with each other as siblings or us interacting with them is gentle too.

And so we try as much as possible to uphold that.

We try to ensure that the people who come into our house uphold that as well because having the home as a safe place is really important to us.