Positive parenting: The the ONE thing you should always say when disciplining your kids

One of the major tasks of parenting young children is teaching them to behave – both by modelling the behaviour we are telling them to display and also correcting them when they misbehave.

Because young children do misbehave from time to time. The thing is – they are meant to. Testing limits and exploring and pushing everyone's buttons is genuinely a toddler's job. That is how they learn about the world and what they can and can not do. It is our job as parents to guide them towards better social behaviour. So we all have to discipline, that is a given. But how we discipline varies, and, according to Mother.ly, many of us are going about it the wrong way. According to the website, the whole trick when disciplining is to make children feel empowered to know that they can change their behaviour – and that not making this clear can cause a feeling of permanence, meaning children can start feeling like they are bad or a failure. "When children realise they have done something wrong they feel failure, and to them, it feels permanent," the website explains. "So our job as parents is to suggest other ways to handle situations and give them tools to handle their emotions as well as empower them to change their behaviour."

What you should be doing to encourage a change is behaviour is the following:

Correct the behaviour Identify the problem Engage them in perspective taking Offer an alternative But most importantly, what you should always do, is let them know you believe in them and that they have learned from this and will do things differently going forward. How? By simply reminding them: “You’ll remember next time.” That way, you are putting your trust in your child and empowering them to think that they can, in fact, behave better the next time.