Discipline with children

At a time when I am enjoying contact on a regular basis with young people doing an excellent job of bringing up their children, the subject of discipline is causing me to reflect.

These parents show a fair bit of wisdom but mostly confidence and strength of character as they take on their youngsters and teach them what they are not allowed to do.

I can see that distracting them can be a useful strategy but setting up rules that are to be adhered to takes a lot of hard work. One has to cope with the children's frustration of not getting their own way. However not getting your own way is a lesson we all need to learn to cope with.

Parking children in front of tele can be a way of distracting them and getting the children "out of your hair". I wonder whether this is overused in many households, this could move on to computer games and chat rooms.

Teaching children that they can only watch tele for a limited time is asking for conflict. Never-the-less is this not a very valuable lesson for them to learn?

How many parents are giving in most of the time then with great relief they are sent off to school. This follows the mistaken belief that schools are there to teach the kids discipline.

I would argue that this is not the case. Parents are the ones to teach discipline so that the children go to school ready to be inspired to learn 'stuff'. This is the job of the teacher: to be able to inspire but this is not the same as to be able to distract. It is true that lessons need to excite the kids so that they want to get involved but underlying this needs to be the discipline learnt at home.

I'm reading in the paper that The Education Department confirmed that in 2007, 40 thousand children were excluded temporarily from primary schools - a rise of 10% on 2004 . Four thousand of these were under the age of five years old being excluded from schools, the majority for violence against other children or a member of staff.

Furthermore the schools are finding that social services are so stretched that they can't offer support to the head teachers that seek assistance.

It seems to me that it isn't just the MPs that need to reform. Some people could do with looking in the mirror.