Okay. The Holidays are coming and kids expect to receive goodies. Lots of typical reasons for that:

• Kids were given lots of goodies last year.
• Kids recall (at least one, isolated episode of) qualifying “good” behavior.
• Marketers have successfully targeted kids and created a need for their goodies.
• Marketers have successfully targeted parents and have equated love with the giving of their goodies.
• Parents have forgotten (or never knew) the distinction between love and affection.
• Kids are visiting relatives who will shower them with goodies.

For these reasons, and several others we’ll examine below, discipline for the near future will be more challenging than usual. Let’s see how parents can maintain control during the Holidays.

Keep discipline an instructional process.

In our culture, discipline has slowly morphed from an educational process to a punitive process. The punishments usually chosen to impose punitive discipline are the withdrawal or the denial of goodies.

But discipline dependent on punishment as a motivator generates anger or depression in the recipient. Both anger and depression work against parents’ goals to encourage kids to make better behavioral choices. Anger generates defiance and depression lessens motivation.

By contrast, instructional discipline is goal-oriented and can be energized with powerful, inexpensive and inexhaustible rewards, totally independent of store-bought goodies. What you may not know is instructional discipline is an act of love. Rather than threatening love, such discipline strengthens love.

Did you say, “Powerful, inexpensive, inexhaustible rewards?”

Yep. Before we identify them, we need to understand two components of Nurturance. Nurturance is everything parents do to support and grow kids and it consists of Love and Affection.

In its simplest form, love can be considered the provision of food, shelter and clothing under any and all circumstances – totally independent of kids’ behavior. By providing love, parents are “saying” through these acts, “our relationship rests on a steady, safe and predictable foundation.”

Affection is different from love because it may appropriately be made contingent upon right behavior. When parents give affection, such acts say, “We enjoy your presence and approve of your behavior.”

It should go without saying when kids misbehave and create parental anguish, affection should be withheld pending their choice of right behavior.

Doling out affection, the contingent part of nurturance only when it’s earned by good behavior takes courage, but it’s the basis of an honest parent-child relationship. Affection provided within a love relationship might be called “superaffection”, since it’s more powerful than that provided by strangers or by persons outside the circle of loved ones.

Some concrete examples of Love vs. (Super)Affection

• Having a home and a room to live in is love. Having access to iPhones, computers, video games, toys in one’s room is affection.
• Having nutritious food to eat when the family eats is love. Eating your parents’ special dinner, while sitting with the family at the family table (instead of, say, Dr. Davick’s healthy meal of rice, beans, water and a vitamin tablet – eaten alone in your bedroom), is affection.
• Having warm, clean, appropriate clothing to wear is love. Choosing clothing with your favorite colors, accessories and designs is affection.

The difference between denying and offering affection

Affection denied is a punishment, like any other reward denied. As mentioned before, punishments in any form risk creating anger or depression.

Affection offered is a potential reward. Offering affection for right behavior cannot be interpreted as a punishment. Failure to earn an offered reward results in disappointment or guilt – both of which reactions, unlike anger or depression, motivate better choice-making.

How Holiday Discipline works

Holiday discipline works the same way instructional discipline always works.

Affection by a parent is offered as a reward for right behavior.   Affection can take the form of a special parent-child activity, a broadening of privileges, and yes, even the purchase of gifts or “goodies.” Affection offered within a love relationship (“superaffection”) is more powerful a reward than affection given by others, so parents can be more powerful disciplinarians than distant relatives or grandparents. Affection is inexpensive (and can be free), totally under parents’ control to give or not to give, and always viewed by kids as desirable.

Here’s an example of powerful discipline presented to a kid in the Billiard Mode.* In this mode of discipline, misbehavior is deflected by a potential punishment and good behavior is encouraged by a potential reward:

“If you look at that toy you say you want, but put it back on the shelf, I’ll –

• let you bake a cake with me when we get home.

or

• take you ice skating after we get home.

or

• Let you stay up till we (parents) go to bed.

This form of discipline offers a reward for not insisting on getting a toy at the store. Getting the affectionate reward is offered only as a consequence of a difficult, but preferred behavioral choice. The potential denial of affection is a potential punishment posed by the discipline, but only if misbehavior is chosen.

There are several other disciplinary models to choose from, but the Billiard Model above is very efficient, very effective and very easy to master.

*Other forms of discipline, including Brick Wall, Hansel & Gretel and Distraction modes, all powered by affection, are presented in the author’s recent publication, Discipline Your Child…without going to jail! They are available in print and in digital format at http://www.DrDavick.com.