It's pretty common for parents to think of themselves as disciplining their children.
But shouldn't the children at some point be able to learn some self-discipline? And discipline
themselves instead? I say, yes. This video is all about how to teach your children self-discipline.
So, what really is self-discipline? Discipline comes from the word disciple. Disciple means
follower of the teacher. So, if a person is self-disciplined, they know who their teacher
is and they follow with the teacher would have them do. So, if your role is the parent,
then you're the teacher, they're the learner. Self-discipline means control themselves to
be in alignment with what you, the teacher would have them do. Years ago, when I'm just
a young mother and I had 2 toddlers of my own and that was it. My husband went back
to school and I decided that in order to help my family financially that I needed to work
again. But I didn't want to leave my children because they were so young and I wanted that
time with them. In fact, I was a career woman and I thought really hard to get that time
with them. So, we decided to do foster care for treatment children. And for years, we
brought you the ages 12 to 18 into our home to teach them how to fix their relationships,
how to conquer some of their hang ups, how to deal with of their processing differences.
And we decided that we would call what we were going to teach them self-government.
We were going to teach them how to discipline themselves. So, what is self-government? Self-government
is being able to determine the cause and effect of any given situation and possessing the
knowledge of behaviors so that you can control them. Which means that we are going to teach
those youth how to examine themselves and decide that whatever they found was okay.
And that they could make up a better plan for their future. There are 3 V's that we're
going to focus on for how to teach your children self-discipline in this video. V's meaning
like the letter V. The first V is vocabulary. Your children need to know the words behind
what you're even doing. So often, parents go about the task of parenting without letting
their children in on what it is that we're really even doing with this whole process
of parenting. Well, let's see. What are some of the vocabulary words that they might need
to know? They might need to know what self-discipline is or what self-government is. That could
be important especially if that's one of the goals. They may need to understand the word
freedom. Because freedom is at the root of self-government and self-discipline. When
a person knows which direction they ought to be headed and they align themselves with
that direction, they find the most freedom possible. They also find confidence. And they're
better equipped to handle the problems that are going to be facing them in the future.
Vocabulary is the root of all learning. No matter what we learn whether it's what a denominator
is what it means to saute or what a tulip is. Those are just words. Everything is just
words. So, why wouldn't we teach our children some of the most vital lessons they need to
know which is how to thrive and survive in this world of family communication. There
are going to be parents one day themselves, right? So, don't they need to know what you're
doing so that one day they can feel confident knowing what they're doing? A good leader
always prepares the people so that they don't have to make the same mistakes that the leader
made before. They can build upon where the leader was when they taught them. So, if we're
good leaders to our children, we need to get them more involved in understanding what we're
doing in our parenting, in our communication and in our teaching with them. One of the
big vocabulary words that the family needs to understand is they need to understand the
word role. What does the word role mean? It actually has an interesting beginning. So,
if you look at Webster's 1828 dictionary which happens to be one of my favorite books to
study from, I know, I'm a geek. I love the dictionary. Anyway, when you look in Webster
1828 dictionary and you look up the word role, R-O-L-E, it doesn't exist. But the word R-O-L-L
does exist. Well, on further inspection, I found out that the word R-O-L-L was the word
that lead to R-O-L-E. So, years ago, playwrights would write down the words for every person's
part in the play. And then there was a day called rollday. They would take these pieces
of parchment that they had written all the lines on. They would roll them up and tie
them with a little ribbon or something. And then on rollday, all of the characters would
line up like Beatrice and Percusio and whoever else there was. And they would hand them their
role of parchment. And their role of parchment was essentially the part that they got assigned
for the play. And it also have of course all their lines. Well, somewhere between then
and now, we ended up making the word R-O-L-E. Which signifies the part that you are supposed
to play. The person that you are in connection with all of the other players or the other
people in your life. Maybe in your family. Roles are a vital part of our identity personally
and for our whole families joint identity as well. In fact, it's so important that there
was a time when I realized here I was talking about parenting all the time but people didn't
have a basic understanding of what Roles even were. So, I wrote this book called ROLES:
The Secret To Family, Business and Social Success. So, that people could see an illustration
of what a family is like when their roles are not in the right place. And what family
feels like when their roles are in the right place. That's an important V, vocabulary.
The word is Roles. There are many other vocabulary words that you need to teach your children.
Teach them what is an attitude problem. What is attention seeking? What's the difference
between a positive attention seeking and negative attention seeking? What is teaching and what
is a lecture. What's the difference? What does obedience really mean? Did you know that
obedience actually means that a person has received the law they know the teaching and
then they choose act upon that teaching? And if a person has not ever learned the law or
received teaching, they are not actually disobedient? They might be annoying. yes. But they are
not disobedient. The seoond V is vision.The family needs to know where they're going in
order to create the type of environment where a child will learn self discipline. In fact,
I call this environment a family government. If you're going to teach your children self-government,
it's going to happen within a family government. So, what is this picture of where you're going?
This vision of the future. The create a positive and really productive vision for your family,
it has to be tangible. It has to be something the can hold on to. Not just the statement
that you say. But a picture of something in the future that you want to become. In fact,
that's what it means to have a vision, is to look ahead to the future and to plan who
you will be in the future. In this book PARENTING: A House United, I talk about creating a 20-year
vision for your family. Our vision centers on Christmas Eve. And it's full of smells
and sounds. And even we talk about the types of conversations that we'll be having as a
family. We've created a vivid picture in the future for our family to hold on to and try
to achieve on a daily basis . Are we going to be perfect at first? No. But we have to
know where we're going. So, you've got to take the time to help your family establish
a plan and a picture for the future and who you're all choosing to be. The third V for
teaching the children's self-discipline is voice. The children have to know what they
can say. Everyone wants to have a voice in the family. In fact, when you teach your children
self-discipline or self-government, that should make it so the family has more to say, not
less to say. Maybe that doesn't sound like a welcome thing for some people because maybe
they just want everybody to stop talking and to stop making so much noise. But when it's
the good kind of noise when they're talking to each other about happy things and they're
involved in projects together and understanding each other, this is good voice. Children need
to know how to talk to their parents to be the most successful. This will increase their
self-discipline more than anything else. So, they need skills. In our family, we teach
4 basic skills for success. We teach following instructions, accepting no answers, accepting
consequences and disagreeing appropriately. Look at that skill accepting consequences.
That doesn't sound like a very productive or powerful thing because it sounds kind of
negative consequences. But no, accepting consequences is incredibly liberating. When a person knows
how to stay calm and say okay or disagree with their parents, disagree appropriately
with their parents, when a correction is given, that person feels free to be able to be okay
with it. If they have the skill they need to follow through with during that moment
of correction. Are children need the freedom that comes with knowing what to say to solve
their problems. They need a voice. Disagreeing appropriately helps them to get their way.
Do they know that? We should tell them. Just like we're going to share the vocabulary that
they need to understand what we're really doing, let's share the skills they need with
them so that they can be successful and happy. And strengthen their bonds and relationships
in the family so that there really is a happy place. A place that feeds everybody's souls
instead of drains everybody's emotionally. I'm going to tell you a story about the black
family. They had 6 children and they were really dedicated parents. But they had a problem.
The problem was that the children and the parent oftentimes do not communicate very
effectively. The children didn't know the skills for effective communication, how to
get their way, how to be understood. And the parents didn't know either. So, what would
happen is they would power struggle with each other. Sometimes mom and dad would yell. Sometimes
they would raise a heavy hands to the children. The children will constantly having fear of
dad. And running to mom to be saved. So that created the division in the husband and wife
relationship because they didn't unity in their parenting styles either. Then they learn
the 4 basic skills and the 6 teaching styles that I teach to parents as well as how we
implement those things in their family. And something transformed. After just a few short
weeks of working on these, the children started saying, "I like this. I like our family. I
actually want to be like dad when I used to be afraid of him." That was huge. After a
few months of working on their self-government individually, parents and children, we had
a meeting together. And the children expressed how they truly felt their parents were their
heroes because they didn't know that their family could overcome this contention problem.
This fear problem. The children thought they always had to stay a bit emotionally disconnected,
especially from dad. That they just had to look tough and say what they wanted them to
say. Instead, their relationship grew into something with more dimensions. With a heart
dimension. And the children now see their parents as the heroes that they want to become
because the parents learned how to conquer their beast with skills. But so the children.
So, what is one of the key things that parents can do as they're teaching their children
these skills so that the children have a voice, the parents can work on their voice too. The
parents can choose self-government too. And use scripts instead of emotional reactions.
So that everyone can trust each other more. Oftentimes, people think the reason that their
child won't learn self-discipline is because their strong-willed. Well, strong-willed children
have the very best chance of learning self-discipline than anybody else actually. There's more that
I'd like to tell you in the next video which is called "How To Discipline A Strong-Willed
Child?" So, go to the next video so that you can learn more about how to help you and your
children better discipline yourself.