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