Durrant – building block 3

The next building block is understanding how children think and feel, which is really understanding child development, and realizing how important certain developmental tasks are along the way. So what we do in positive discipline is that we teach parents about child development, and the key developmental tasks, and how those relate to what we usually think of as disciplinary situations. So for example, there are many parents who see infant crying as a disciplinary situation. So they might intervene by shaking or hitting, or yelling, or ignoring, thinking that those responses will teach the child not to cry, that this is –this is a matter of self-control, and I can teach that child either by through physically punishing him, or ignoring him, and that that will be an effective way of disciplining the child. And we know, of course, as developmentalists that that just isn’t what crying is all about at all — that crying is a very important developmental task. It’s a way that children organize their brains, it’s a way that they communicate; it’s the way that they exercise their muscles. It has a — many very important functions. It also is a signal that the child could be in distress of some sort. So we help parents to understand what behaviors mean developmentally, what their–their actual function is in the child’s development, and how it they influence the child’s brain development, their development of self-regulation, and their relationships with us. So that’s just one example. Of course we go right through development, from birth right through adolescence, because we believe that it’s very important for parents to understand that the foundations are laid in infancy for adolescence. So if we take crying as an example, if we respond sensitively to an infant’s crying, we start to build that trust and attachment that is the foundation of their relationship with us when they’re teenagers.