Sarabeth’s Reviews > No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind > Status Update

We want to help kids develop. A dual motive, processing the events that occur in their lives. The first is all about teaching children to be aware of and simply since their subjective experiences. But also we want our kids to be able to observe what’s going on with them, and the experience is impacting them.

Explained most simply, mindset is the ability to see our own mind, as well as the mind of another. It allows us to develop meaningful relationships while also maintaining a healthy and independent sense of self.

So 1-2-3 discipline focuses on one definition (teaching) and two principals (wait y til your child is ready, and be consistent but not rigid).

At times you might try a “do – over.“ Instead of immediately offering a punishment for speaking disrespectfully, you can say something like, “I bet if you try again, you could come up with a more respectful way to say that.” You’re still consistently maintaining your expectations, but you’re doing so in a way that’s often much more beneficial than a rigidly imposed, unrelated consequence.

It goes back to what we talked about in the previous chapter: response flexibility. We want to intentionally respond to a situation and a way that considers what works best for our child and for our family, even if that means making an exception to our normal rules and expectations.

The goal, in other words, is to maintain a consistent but flexible approach with your kids, so they know what to expect from you, but they also know at times you will thoughtfully consider all of the factors involved.

One of the main reasons parents become rigid with their children is because they are practicing a form of fear based parenting.

In reality, though, attention seeking behavior is not only completely developmentally appropriate, it’s actually relational. Attention is a need of all children everywhere. In fact, brain imaging studies, show that the experience of physical pain in the experience of relational pain, like rejection, look very similar in terms of location of brain activity.

One of the most effective and powerful ways to communicate “I am not a threat“ is to put your body in a posture that’s the opposite of imposing and threatening. Lots of people talk about getting at a child’s eye level, but one of the quickest ways to communicate safety, and the absence of threat is to get below the child’s eye level and put your body into a very relaxed position that communicates calm.

Even if you’re intimidation results in your child, appearing calm, she’ll actually be feeling anything other than calm. Her heart will, pound and response to the stress because she is afraid enough to shut down her emotions and hide her feelings in an attempt to keep you from becoming more angry.