Teaching Values through Discipline that Reaches the Heart – Day 5

Welcome back to my Heart of the Matter 10 Days of… Series on Teaching Values in your homeschool!  One busy week is coming to a close, but one more week of practical advice still remains!  Today I’m writing about instilling values in your children through heart-felt discipline.

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I’ll be the first to admit that heartfelt discipline is not my strongest parenting skill.  It’s way easier to demand a child stop doing something “because I said so” than it is to take time to reach the heart of why our family doesn’t act a certain way.  It’s also easier to send everyone to timeout (for my sanity) than it is to stop everything for a family meeting to discuss what’s going on and what we can do to fix it.

Those things are easier, but they don’t ever build anything more in my children than thoughts that I’m too busy and too frustrated to care about their problems.

You know, I just said they are easier, but in reality they aren’t at all easier.  They are easier for the moment – until I have to deal with the same behavior issue 20 more times this week (or this day!)  Every single time I’ve taken the time to get to the heart of a discipline issue right away, it’s been nipped in the bud.