Parenting And Discipline: How Parents Should Set Limits And Routines For Toddlers

Children experience the reciprocation of normally powerful social, emotional and physical needs. Their behavior also reveals strong interests and appropriate curiosities in their development. When parents regularly meet the needs and impulses of children in a responsible and timely manner, they build the foundation for their children to live within a structured and interpersonal and orderly physical environment.

By properly meeting the needs of their children, they provide their infants and toddlers with a security that builds trust in the child. Living in an environment that derives from their order, in the first six years of life, with a trustworthy behavior of parents is vital if a child develops healthy self-discipline and lives an orderly life thereafter.

Without a consistent sense of trust and confidence provided by parents, the child will not have the foundation upon which the child can develop self-discipline later. Routines and limits in discipline also provide a sense of order for the child.

Therefore, this can favor a sense of security in the child. However, how these routines and limits are established and applied by parents is as important as their own routines and limits. According to Empowering Parents, if parents enact routines and boundaries rigidly, unanswered or authoritatively disciplined, they will create angry, reticent and uncooperative children.

As reported by Parents, when children are about one or two years old, they strive to be autonomous and as a result, they become willing to conform to certain rules and routines. This begins a significant period in a child's life.

When children begin to manifest this normal behavior, it is very important that parents involve them, as much as reasonable as possible, in the development and execution of these routines and the creation of boundaries. If a person is given limits or decisions, he or she usually resists them, forgets or does not follow them.

As a great deal of research has shown, however, when a person is involved in making the boundaries and decisions that will structure their life, the individual will develop a sense of personal ownership of those boundaries and decisions. It is as if they become part of the boundaries and the boundaries become part of them. Decisions are your decisions. As a result, the individual is much more likely to meet the limits.

Setting boundaries with a child often requires parents to think about and plan for the future. Here is a typical situation. You and your child are on their way to visit a park or one of your child's friends. Before leaving, it is important to establish with your child how long the visit will last. The child should also know what you are going to do after the visit.

Next, be sure to ask your child what kind of warning he or she would like to receive as a sign that it is time to leave. Some children simply want to be told. However, it is fun for parents and children to come up with a non-verbal secret signal together.