Читать книгу The Good Behaviour Book - Марта Сирс - Страница 12

Discipline is grounded on a healthy relationship between parent and child. To know how to discipline your child you must first know your child. This kind of knowledge resides deep in parents’ minds. You could call it intuition, but that term has a kind of mystique that confuses parents. (“How can I trust my intuition? I don’t even know if I have any!”) The term “connection” is easier to understand. With the high-touch parenting style called attachment parenting (to be explained in Chapter 2), you can build and strengthen this connection between you and your child, laying the foundation for discipline. Connected parents become their own experts on their own child, so they know what behaviour to expect as appropriate and how to convey their expectations. Connected children know what behaviour parents expect, and make an effort to behave this way because they want to please their parents. These parents and children together develop a style of discipline that works for them. In Chapter 2 we describe the tools for connecting with your baby and young child so that you can read your child’s behaviour and respond appropriately, and the two of you can bring out the best in each other. Throughout the rest of the book we help you stay connected to your child and show you how to reconnect if you had a shaky start in the early years of parenting.

Unconnected parents, unsure of what is going on in their child’s mind, may lack confidence in their own disciplinary skills, so they search for answers to their child’s behaviour from outside experts. They wander from method to method, groping for answers to problems that could have been prevented. If you and your child are having discipline problems and you feel there is a distance in your relationship, chances are the connection between you and your child needs some work. It’s never too late to improve that relationship, although the earlier you connect with your child the easier discipline will be. Getting connected and staying connected with your child is the foundation of discipline and the heart of the attachment approach.