Discipline with Love and Love with Discipline

Today, I am going to talk about discipline.

Disciplining children is one of the major tasks for parents. We do it 70% of the time. Be it in shopping centre, at home, in school or in the car, we discipline children most of the time. It may be an angry look. It may be a loud NO. It may be a slap on the buttocks.

There are mainly three types of parents: the regimental (army) type, the jelly type (no rules) and the mixture of both type. The best is a mixture of both, right? Wrong.

All the three types are lacking. The regimental type lacks the reason for the discipline, the jelly type lacks the action for discipline and the mixture type will confuse your child most.

The best type in my opinion is the discipline with love type.

It is obvious right? Since I put it as the topic for the post. While it is extremely easy to identify this type of discipline, it is also extremely difficult to practice. Why? Because love is being extinguished when one is angry. When you are angry with your child, you will be overwhelmed with emotions and you will find yourself momentarily unable to love. However, you must understand that your anger arises from love for the child and hence, it is very important to let your child know that you still love them even though you are angry with their actions.

As a male, this is not an easy lesson to learn. In fact, my wife has to keep checking me in order for me to correct myself. On top of that, I am very emotional by nature. I can be full of love now and full of anger few minutes later. However, like I said in my previous posts, I am a very intra-personal person. I know my weaknesses and I know I cannot impart this to my children.

I forced myself to love my children even when I am angry. I make it a point to say 'I love you' to them after I scold them. It gets easier each time and the results are formidable. My children loves me back even when I am angry with them.

And most important of all, you change their heart before you change their behavior.

The method is very simple:

Step 1: Discipline the child (Scold or cane)
Step 2: Explain why the punishment is necessary.
Step 3: Hug the child and say 'I love you' after the explanation.

This way, your child can protect his self-esteem and still feel your love after being punished. It is very important. If your child cannot find love in you, he will find love elsewhere and most probably will seek refuge in friends as soon as they can. If you have good rapport with your children, you will realise that they will still listen to you even when they have many good friends.

Discipline without love is very damaging to your child's core identity. He will feel unloved and constantly in the wrong. He will obey out of fear. Take away the control and he will go berserk.

Love without discipline will give your child the wrong idea of love. Anyone who does not give in to his whims does not love him.

Try it today! Love with discipline.

Stay tuned!

little motivator

Environment for Learning

This is one of the most neglected aspect of learning. A good environment is imperative for optimal learning.

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Physical Environment
This refers to the tables and chairs, the temperature of the surroundings, the noise level, etc.

For this, usually a comfortable table and a comfortable chair is good enough. The room must be airy enough and it is not warm or stuffy. The tip here is to omit stuff. While you are coaching your kid in his learning, make sure:

- you are not playing games on your iphone
- the TV is not on
- you are not working on your computer

Anything that distracts your child is bad here.

Emotional Environment
For parents, this might be the trickiest to handle. We are emotional creatures by design and tends to get frustrated when the child is not progressing according to our expectations. We raised our voices. We banged the tables. We used threats. Maybe some of you are not guilty, but I am.

That is why I often suggest to parents to hire a private tutor instead of coaching their children themselves. It will be less emotional for you and your kid this way.

As a parent, I have to constantly check myself when I am coaching my sons in their learning. Every time I raise my voice, I have to curb the growing feeling of helplessness and frustration. I have to remind myself that the process is more important than the result. Love for learning is what I want for my children. And raising my voice will not increase their love for learning. It took me years of practice before I could be patient with my children on their learning. If you are also struggling with this, it is normal, but you have to work on it to prevent further damage to your kid.

If your kid cries at the study table due to your pressure, then you have a lot to work on for the emotional environment. In order for the child to be motivated to learn, he must at least feel safe emotionally in the situation. A crying child will mean that he is learning out of fear or out of fulfilling the expectations of someone else.

To create a suitable emotional environment, you MUST NOT:

- raise your voice
- reprimand
- threaten to take away privileges (like play time)
- be sarcastic

You MUST:
- be gentle in your instruction
- guide when the child makes a mistake
- encourage when the child feels like giving up
- ask questions to uncover hidden problems
- engage your child in a meaningful way

Social Environment
This applies when you have many children learning together. It is very important if you are a teacher handling more than 40 students. The dynamics of this will show when you have one student being ostracized by the rest of the class. This will definitely result in his learning to be disrupted.

I often counter this before it happens. I will share stories in class about cohesiveness and appeal to their empathy for ostracized pupils. So far so good.

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To motivate your child to learn, we have to tackle the environment for learning. In my opinion, the physical environment can always be controlled easily. It is the emotional environment that is difficult. Remember, your emotions will affect your child's emotions and in turn, it will affect your child's motivation for learning.

If you think it is easy for me, you are wrong. I cannot remember how many times I have flared up in front of my kids. I cannot remember how many times I asked my wife if I am a bad father/teacher to my sons. I cannot remember how many times my elder son cried because I was too harsh on him. It all boils down to expectations. Sometimes, I forget that Zenith is only 4 years old.

Two things helped me to be more patient: my wife and my journal. I will often talk to my wife about this problem and she will 'catch' me when I get too angry. I am a very intra-personal person and writes in my journal nearly everyday. I will write down my mistakes and my strategies to curb those mistakes when I encounter them again. Over the years, I get better and better. Now, I still get angry when my sons are slow in their learning, but I am able to control myself better.

I want to nurture their love for learning.

Let's all work hard together!

little motivator

Creating a Reading Habit in Your Child

Never force a child to read.

Yes. that is the most important statement of this post.

Why? Because you are actually making the child dislike reading by forcing him to read. Reading must be enjoyable in order to sustain it. By forcing the child to read, you kill his interest for reading before he can enjoy it. This is important. Never force your child to read.

I will suggest 2 main areas to look into when you are creating a habit of reading for your child.

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1. Entertaining the child with story-telling

This is the first step to a habit of reading. My wife started reading to my boys when they were as young as 3 months old. You may think that it is a bit too early, but reading to a child at this young age will expose him to the 'entertainment value' of books before he comes into contact with any other medium (like the phone and tablet). As soon as they developed their speech, they started to read back to me.

Reading a story is a skill. If you read it in a very boring way, your child will receive it in a very boring way. And reading ultimately appears boring to them and they will not want to pick it up. If you read a story in a very dramatic way with all the actions and 'characters' voices', your child will think that reading is very entertaining and will look forward to your reading to them. As soon as they develop their literacy skill, they will want to try reading by themselves because they will want to mimic you.

Believe it or not, I 'train' very hard in my story-telling skills. All my students look forward to my stories and I use them as an incentive for their good behavior. But ultimately, I want them to enjoy the stories and read some stories on their own.

2. Availability of books

This is actually one of the most important ingredients in creating the habit. The sequence is like this:

1. Child is exposed to reading.
2. Child likes reading.
3. Child wants to read.
4. Child reads what he can see (including signs and notices)
5. Child gains self-awareness and requests parent to bring the child to the library/bookshop to borrow/buy books.
6. Child grows up and goes to library by himself.

After your child is entertained by your story-telling, he will most probably develop an interest for reading. You must capture this interest quickly by making a lot of books available to him. This can be done by buying or borrowing the books. Now, here is the crunch. I have seen parents buy many books/magazines but place them all on shelves. A child who has just develop the interest for reading will not be motivated enough to walk to the shelf, take a book and walk back to the couch to read the book. We must bring the book to him first.

One thing at a time. We are cultivating the habit of reading, not the habit of tidiness here. We need to focus on only one.

If you come to my house unannounced, you will find my house super untidy. Many books will be all over the place mixing with the toys and musical instruments. What I want is to let my child access the books even when they are playing with their toys. They will play with their toys and 'discover' a book that is interesting and will switch to reading in the middle of play. At this stage, it is easier to bring the book to the child than to bring the child to the books. In addition, you will want to make the books available when the child is in waiting mode (for example, waiting for meals, waiting to go out, waiting to go school, waiting for a sibling, etc.)

If you have bought many books and your child is not going to the shelf to get the books, try bringing some books and place them on the floor in the living room.

This is a chance issue. The child might not pick up any books even when you make the books available to them. You must be patient and go back to stage one to arouse their interest again. Pick up a book and say "Wow, look at what I have found!" Then, start to read the story to the child and engage him. The next time round when the child sees the book lying around again, he will be tempted to pick it up and read.

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Creating a habit of reading is one of the most important goal any parent should have. It is not going to be easy and as a parent, my advice to you is to be very patient. Your child will thank you for this habit when they grow up.

Stay tuned for the next post!!!

Cheers!!!!
little motivator.