As your children transition from being infants to being toddlers, there will come a time when you realize that it is time to think about discipline. Your toddler needs you to help him or her learn what the rules and boundaries are, and to teach him or her to behave appropriately. This is often easier said than done, and many parents become frustrated and confused when their attempts at disciplining their toddler are not effective.
The good news is that there is a lot of information and advice out there on the topic of discipline. The bad news is that like most things related to parenting, there is no one size fits all approach that will work for all children and all families. Before you throw your hands up in despair, take some time to think about why your current discipline strategy may not be working. Usually, the reason that a disciplinary approach does not work for a particular child is that it is not a good fit with their unique temperament.
Some children are by nature easier to discipline because their temperament is easygoing and they are eager to please. Others are more challenging, and will resist most disciplinary techniques time after time. One type of child is not better than the other; they are just different and require different approaches to discipline. My son is almost two and a half, and I must admit that I am having a hard time learning how to effectively discipline him.
This week, I learned that the reason for this is that our temperaments are very different. I have always been very compliant by nature, the kind of person that was teased for being a “goody two shoes”. In my mind, rules were there to be followed and parents, teachers, and other authorities were to be respected and listened to. Of course, this went out the window for a bit when I was a teenager, but for the most part that’s the way that I am even as an adult. My son is quite different. He tests rules and boundaries, over and over, just to make sure of where they are. He is persistent, intense, and quick to point out discrepancies between what I say and what I do. Since I never really did that, what he does did not make sense to me until I decided to learn more about how people with different temperaments respond to rules and discipline. While I have not yet figured out exactly what he will respond to in the discipline department, I feel that understanding how our temperaments differ is a step in the right direction.