Importance Of Positive Discipline: Tapping Into The Psychology Of Children

Many children develop negative or alarming patterns of behavior that cause concern for most parents. Some kids adopt attitudes and throw angry, violent or defiant episodes under certain situations. Others become shy, withdrawn, submissive or too sensitive.

It is also possible for children to acquire habits such as thumb-sucking or biting their nails. They usually have nightmares and experience difficulty in concentrating on their tasks.

Many parents do not know how to deal with these kinds of habits and behaviors. Some decide to punish their children. They use the time-out technique or the infamous method of taking away privileges.

Others, on the other hand, opt for intimidation by overwhelming, threatening, yelling or frightening young ones. Parents usually end up using a combination of all these reactions. Later, when reflecting, they are neither satisfied with these methods nor with the effects they yield.

What can parents do to limit or eliminate these behaviors, which may be aggressive, passive or fearful? How can the child's energy be released to divert it towards more constructive ends? How can parents prevent misconduct and what action should they take against it? What would be a reasonable, effective and compassionate approach to child-rearing that would compel children to behave correctly?

According to Caring For Kids, research on child development and child rearing offers a great deal of valuable information. Many of the appropriate and useful child-rearing patterns emerge from numerous studies of young children.

When parents use these principles of research-based child-rearing, they build the foundation for the development of an emotionally healthy and well-behaved person. As a result, these parents enjoy paternity.

The method of child-rearing that best represents research on children and parenting uses a diagnostic approach to understanding and addressing all kinds of child behavior. Diagnosis is a process by which information on the motives for behavior is systematically collected.

The purpose of this compilation is to establish the possible underlying causes. The diagnostic approach considers that all infantile behavior is a sign, a signal or a symptom that conveys the current state of the child's physical and psychosocial needs and impulses.

When a young child performs well and follows proper development, one of two conclusions can be drawn. It may be that the child's normal needs and underlying impulses are being met or the child may be experiencing the frustration of unsatisfied needs and impulses. Alarming behavior occurs when one or more normal developmental needs are frustrated and the child cannot tolerate this frustration.

Young children have a number of important and normal needs that, if not met, can cause them distress. Young children cannot tolerate too much frustration. However, they have a greater ability to learn to tolerate frustration if they assimilate in their early years that their parents will meet their needs on time and reliably.

Mom Junction explains that when a child feels the assurance that their parents will meet their needs, they feel more secure when experiencing various frustrations. If, on the other hand, a child frequently feels and expresses normal childhood frustrations that parents do not resolve with receptivity, he develops patterns of response to fear.

With that said, the child will be anxious and alert for his own needs, which he will express in an aggressive and urgent manner. One will find it very difficult to tolerate a kid's feelings of frustration.

On the contrary, in the face of the least sense of frustration, the child with a defensive state of alert will try to draw attention through misconduct. This kind of child also tends to behave badly or resort to self-balancing habits to manage anxiety.