WHAT IS DISCIPLINE? Parenting is the process of care taking and education through which you help your child grow from a dependent infant into an independent young adult. Care taking is a matter of expressing love. Education is a matter of training. As a healthy parent, you must provide both love and training to raise a healthy child. To provide love alone or training alone is not enough. Training without love can become extremely oppressive, and love without training can become over indulgent. In either case, a "spoiled" child can result, spoiled for healthy relationships later on by becoming socially compliant or socially domineering to his or her cost. Discipline is part of a parent’s training responsibility. Through example and direction, your job is to help your child learn "right" beliefs and follow "right" behaviors in life. The definition of "right" in which you believe will depend on the traditions and values you carry into parenthood from your own personal history. No two families have exactly the same definitions of "right" to which they subscribe. This book describes changing strategies for instilling discipline in your child in a positive way as he or she grows from infancy through adolescence. As your child changes with growth, you must change your approaches to discipline to remain effective. Why is discipline important? Children are born dependent on external care and ignorant of social conduct. This is why your job as parents, in addition to providing stable support and nurturing love, is to create and convey a structure of beliefs and behavior children can beneficially learn to live by in the family and follow out in the world. Clearly establishing this structure is your disciplinary responsibility. Discipline is more than simply getting your child to behave the way you want or stopping your child from behaving the way you don’t want on a specific occasion. Discipline is the ongoing process of positive instruction and negative correction through which your children are taught to act within family rules and according to family values by you, their parents. So, for the purposes of this book: Discipline = Instruction + Correction. To put this equation into effective action, you need to make one additional modification: Discipline = Ninety Per Cent Instruction + Ten Per Cent Correction. Reverse that ratio, and the child’s behavior usually gets worse, not better, because excessive negative responses from parents tend to encourage more negative responses in return from the hurt and angry child. Angry parents who threaten "And I will keep punishing you until your attitude improves!" only encourage a more sullen attitude in their child.