Discipline | KidsDirect

Tantrums

Every parent deals with tantrums. Nobody brags about them at pickup. Most of us just want to forget they happened, and we secretly wonder if our kid is the only one who does this. Handled the wrong way, a tantrum can spiral fast and leave everyone rattled. This is toddler tantrum. It’s easy to read a tantrum as pure defiance, a kid trying to run the show. That reading misses what’s actually going on underneath. Miss it, and you end up fighting the tantrum instead of getting through it. What a Tantrum Actually Is A few basic truths make tantrums

Is Spanking Harmful to Children?

Short answer, yes. The American Academy of Pediatrics reviewed decades of research and landed on a clear position. Is Spanking Harmful to Children? Parents and caregivers should never spank, hit, slap, or shame a child as a form of discipline. That’s not one doctor’s opinion, it’s the official policy of the largest pediatric organization in the country. It wasn’t always this settled. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, a well known developmental psychologist named Dr. Diana Baumrind ran one of the more thorough studies on the topic, and it complicated the picture for a while. She was responding to

Polarized Parenting Hurts Everyone

By Dr. Kalman Heller, Child and Family Psychologist “She makes a different dinner for each kid.”“He walks into the house and starts criticizing the children.”“She threatens a punishment and then forgets about it.”“He gets too angry, the children are afraid of him.”“She lets them get away with too much.”“He punishes them too much.”“She doesn’t support me, and the kids know it.”“His father was never around, he doesn’t know what to do.” When Natural Differences Go Bad These are among the most common statements parents make in my office. They reflect natural differences that have gone bad. Parents are rarely identical