1-2-3 Magic

Today I took a parenting class on base called 1-2-3 Magic.  We watched a video by Dr Phelan, who is a child psychologist that came up with this discipline method.  Abbie is too young to use it on (it’s meant for kids aged 2-10ish), but I still learned a lot and plan on using it eventually.

One of the things he talked about in his video is how we expect kids to act like little adults and to be reasonable and unselfish.  But he said that, by nature, kids are unreasonable and selfish and it’s our job as parents to make them reasonable and unselfish.  I was talking to the teacher of the class afterwards and she was saying that kids don’t have the cognitive ability to understand consequences as a way of discipline until they’re closer to 3 years old.

The jist of the course was that we use too much talking and too much emotion when dealing with our kids behavior and if you take those two things out of the equation when disciplining your kids, you’ll get much better results.  He also said that it helps if everyone around the child on a regular basis is doing this same discipline method with the child.  So mom and dad and Donna, next summer I’ll be teaching this to you guys.  Apparently teachers often use this method too.

I’m excited to try this when she gets older to see how well it actually works.  I took the class with a friend who has an 8 year old, a 5 year old and a 3 year old and she can go home and use it immediately, but I’ll have to tuck it into my back pocket for a while until Abbie is older.

If you want more info on it, let me know!