Toddler

At Today's Parent, we’ve heard it all when it comes to discipline dilemmas. Over the years, you’ve sent tons of questions to our Expert Q & A columnists, posted them on our online forums, and shared them with our writers in countless articles. We’ve seen that certain core concerns tend to show up over and over. So we took 10 of those questions to a panel (right) of top discipline experts.

1 I’m always struggling to find the line between too permissive and too strict. How do I find it?

It’s not easy. For one thing, says Samalin, the line changes as your child grows. For another, permissive and strict are partly in the eye of the beholder.

Arnall thinks the word permissive gets a bad rap. “I think you can say yes to your child 10 times in a row and if you can say no when you really need to, then you’re not permissive.”

Direnfeld, however, advises parents to err on the side of strict. “The disease of our day is self-righteousness — kids who think they deserve everything and can do no wrong,” he argues. “I’m not saying all kids are like that, but I’m seeing more than I used to.”
Fitzner offers a gauge that might help. “If you say yes and you feel bad afterward, that’s probably a sign of being too permissive,” she says. “If you say no and then feel bad, you may have been too strict,” she says.

2 I think my expectations and house rules are really clear. Yet I still have to keep telling my kids the same things over and over. Why?

Because your kids are kids. Arnall says it’s normal to have to repeat yourself. “It might help to know that other parents have to do it too,” she says.

Another reason we need to repeat is that children’s priorities are not the same as ours. “Kids like to play more than they like to do things we want them to do — like chores,” says Samalin. And it’s your children’s job to push limits, says Direnfeld. “They have to see if the limits are real before they can accept them. The parent sets and maintains the limits; the child eventually learns to not only respect the limits, but to understand that when they are set, they are set.”

Originally published in Today's Parent, October 2007