Today I want to discuss a common child discipline mistake parents make when giving consequences. This is the mistake of negotiating limits with your child.

Let us take for example a curfew violation. Your child is supposed to be home at 9:00 p.m. on weekday nights. Your child comes in at 10:00 p.m. You start giving your consequence and your child says, “It’s not fair. All my friends come home at 10:00 and I have to come in at 9:00. It’s not fair. I am already 16.”

Then you start defending yourself and why your curfew is fair.

Well…is it true or not true? Are you being fair? Maybe your child should be able to stay out later. But here is the problem.

Consequences are limits. The limit was set at 9:00 p.m. When your child starts negotiating with you about the time, and you start defending your choice, you ignore the fact that your child went over the limit that was set.

There is a time to negotiate curfew or any other limit, but it is not when a violation of that limit has occurred. Also, you don’t change curfew time when your child is out and calls home for permission to stay out later. That is not the time to change limits.

You can and should negotiate limits. You do this when you can have a conversation with your child about that limit. But when a child has violated the limit, that is not the time to talk about it.

The only issue at hand is that a limit was in place, and fair or not fair, your child just violated that limit. You can discuss what is fair at a different time.

This is a common mistake that parents make. They get sidetracked with other issues. They get sucked into discussions of what is fair or not fair and the fact that a limit has been violated gets diluted.

Limits have to be enforced. When your child breaks a limit, your job is to enforce limits, not to negotiate.

This is only one of the mistakes parents make when giving limits and consequences to discipline their children or teens.

I have a video which will show you the #1 mistake parents make in child discipline and when giving consequences. This mistake is the main reason why consequences and discipline do not work.

If you are having trouble with child behavior, you should see this video right away, because it will show you quickly how to change that problem.

The free video is located at http://ccparenting.com/discipline

Today I want to discuss with you child discipline and using consequences to set and enforce limits.

Children need limits. It is very clear they need limits. First of all, children are not mature enough to handle themselves properly in the world. That is why they live at home with you.


A child needs to be told what to do and when to do it, until he develops the maturity to keep himself safe in certain situations.

A child without limits will go out and stay out all night. He will go to dangerous places. He will get involved in dangerous things.

Your job as a parent is to protect your child and keep him out of trouble. One of the ways you do that is by using limits.

How do you enforce these limits? You use child discipline. Consequences are part of an overall child discipline strategy to help you to enforce limits that you set.

Your child will try to test your limits. Believe me, this is normal. Every child tests limits. It is part of growing up.

You need to have a consequence in place to discourage your child from testing your limit and to let him know that your limit is a real barrier.

It is critical your child understands their limits, because the world is full of limits. It is full of things he cannot do. There are rules and boundaries.

For example, your child can’t go onto someone’s property, because he wants something. He can’t take something from other people, because he wants it. He can’t speed in his car, because he wants to. There are limits. It is part of living in society.

Your child has to learn that limits are real, limits are important, and limits are part of getting along with everybody else in the world. You use consequences to teach this lesson.

Many parents find that their consequences are not effective. Often their children don’t seem to care.

I made a video for you which shows the #1 mistake that parents make when giving consequences. This mistake is the main reason their consequences are not effective.

You can get access to this video right away!

Go to:

Child Discipline

Today I want to discuss child discipline using consequences; specifically what child discipline or consequences can accomplish.

Let’s differentiate between child discipline and punishment. Punishment does not change behavior. You cannot punish your child into behaving better. We see that in our prison system.

Effective child discipline though consequences accomplishes a change in behavior. The advantage that child discipline has over punishment is that a consequence includes a teaching experience. Children act out and misbehave because they don’t know how to handle the situation they are in.

When that happens you need to teach your child how to respond to the situation differently. You can do this through child discipline, specifically through the effective use of consequences. You use child discipline to encourage your child to improve his behavior in the future.

For example, if your child is angry, he will strike at somebody, he will yell, or he may say a curse word. That is the best response he can come up with when he is upset.

By assigning a consequence as part of your child discipline intervention, you teach your child a new response.

“When you are feeling angry or upset and you want to curse, go to your room and don’t curse.”

If he does not go to his room, you give a consequence for cursing. This gives your child a choice. He can stick with his old inappropriate behavior, i. e. cursing, and get the consequence. Or he can incorporate the new behavior and avoid the consequence.

When the situation comes up again, he can either reflexively curse or he can go to his room and cool off. Your child discipline through the consequence encourages him to do the latter and to improve his behavior and make a permanent behavioral change.

For effective child discipline, your consequence must include with it a teaching experience to show your child how to behave better. Failure to do this is one of the mistakes that parents make when trying to correct their child’s behavior. Thus, most parents approach child discipline by giving a negative reinforcement, which is so many parents have trouble getting their children to behave better.

Again, if you just learn these secrets of how to give consequences effectively, you will find it is quite easy and quite effective, and you will have your house turned around in no time.

Today we have a special video for you that you can get to help reveal to you the #1 mistake that parents are making when giving consequences and it is free for you today.

Just go to http://ccparenting.com/discipline and you will get that video right away and you’ll find the #1 mistake parents make.

What should you do when your child says he or she doesn’t care. What I am talking about is when you are disciplining your child by taking away a privilege and he says “I don’t care”. What do you do about that? Parents find that extremely frustrating!

There are a couple of ways to approach this problem.

First of all, your child probably does care. If you remember when your child was small and you punished your child or took something away, they cried and screamed about it and you could tell that it bothered them.

As children get older, they don’t want to let on that you are getting to them. They don’t want to let on that they have lost or they are being beaten down or being controlled by you. They are going to feign and pretend that they don’t care.

Your child probably does care. For example, let’s say your child lives for the cell phone and talks to her friends all the time. Your consequence is that she loses her cell phone for a period of time and she says, “I don’t care”. Well she probably does care! She just doesn’t want to let on.

There are other possibilities. Maybe she doesn’t care and there could be a couple of reasons. First of all, when you give a consequence, if you give it just as a time-based punishment such as you are grounded for a week or you lose your cell phone for a week, you are not giving your child any way to correct the problem. Basically, you are giving a punishment and as we know, punishments do not correct faulty behavior. They don’t improve behavior at all. They don’t really do anything positive.

A correct consequence gives your child the opportunity to end the consequence by correcting the behavior. A consequence teaches your child how to behave better in the future. That is the second thing.

The third possibility is that your child really doesn’t care. The way you can tell that is with the cell phone example we are using, she stops thinking about the cell phone and gets involved with something else. When that happens it becomes clear that the loss of her phone really doesn’t bother her. Then you know you picked the wrong consequence.

If your child really doesn’t care, you need to pick something else. There is always something you can find that the child cares about. That is how you deal with the problem, use child discipline in a wise way when disciplining your child… in other words give an appropriate consequence that he cares about.

I have for you a video that shows you the one most serious mistake that I have seen in the last 5-6 years that parents make throughout the world when giving consequences to their children.

This mistake destroys their ability to use consequences effectively and it is pretty close to universal. I have seen it in every country and I have seen it with most people I have talked to throughout the world. I am giving you this video to show you how to correct that problem.

Please go to http://ccparenting.com/discipline and you will get to see this video right away.

Today we will discuss a very important function that child discipline and consequences does for you and your child. That is learning how to manage emotions.

People have lots of emotional shifts everyday. They can get angry, frustrated, upset and it happens frequently on a daily basis.

An adult who is mature knows to how to manage these feelings. He doesn’t react when he gets angry. He doesn’t react when he gets frustrated. He controls himself and finds ways to manage his emotions in a socially acceptable way.

Children are not like that. Children get angry and they react right away. They get frustrated and they act right away. They feel hurt and they react right away. Part of growing up and living in a society requires that you learn how to manage your feelings and to express them in a way that is not offensive, abusive, threatening, or aggressive to other people.

Child discipline through consequences can help you teach your child to do that. Your child must learn how to manage and control his feelings.

The natural response for a child when he gets hit is to hit back. When a child gets angry, he strikes out. That is not proper. You need to teach your child to find a more socially acceptable method of expression.

You can use child discipline and consequences to teach your child to find a different way of behaving. For example, if your child hits other children, you can develop a consequence so that he learns not to hit in the future.

How do you use a consequence as part of a child discipline strategy?

A consequence is a logical, thought out process that teaches new behavior and shows your child how to behave better in the future. It is connected to the behavior you are trying to change. By connecting the consequence to the behavior, you will be able to use it to teach your child to improve.

This is a mistake that parents often make. They don’t make this connection, which is why many times consequences don’t work.

I have a free video that will reveal to you the #1 mistake parents make when giving consequences. Go to http://ccparenting.com/discipline and you will learn how to avoid this mistake.