Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. So glad you could join us again for this third and last in the series of readings from the Soul of Discipline book. I guess part of the reason that these themes of discipline and guidance and boundaries came up for me is that we are, as I've been telling you, running this training, very simple six-hour training on discipline and guidance for care professionals about how to help the parents that you work with, either as a teacher, a nurse, a therapist, a counselor.
In any way, if you're caring for parents, this course is one of those ones that can really help the parents you work with feel more confident. And that's coming right up. You can click in the show notes and you can see it, all the details right there.
Now the part of the book that I want to read from today is one of my favorites, really. And this is about values because, you see, as I'll read in a moment, discipline has gotten kind of a bad reputation, and you'll hear that in the text. And one way to redefine discipline is to understand that it's disobedience.
That's one way to redefine the whole thing, that disobedience versus disorientation. That a child's actually disoriented. Okay, but another way is to think of it as a definer of values.
And in the text today, that's exactly what we'll explore. And I've been told by so many parents since the publishing of this book that this was another one of those key sort of shifts in the way in which we think and can help us be more steady on our feet and just feeling more grounded when we have to apply boundaries to our kids' lives. So jumping into the text, taking away that which is not David, discipline should not be seen that it's simply punitive and corrective.
It should be a definer of family values. Each time we discipline our children, we will find firm ground under our parenting feet as we clarify what our family stands for. When we tell our kids, in our family, we try not to speak like that.
We just really try hard. It helps settle them. And by the way, I've changed the words, and if you're following the book, we'll just pick that up.
In the book, I write, in our family, we don't speak to each other like that. You know, it was a few years ago now, a mom said she would say that all the time to her daughter, and her daughter would say, then said in a very teary episode, well, then I'm just not a part of this family. And that really made me rethink that sentence that I wrote in the book to, we try hard to not speak that way, act that way in our family.
Because you know, otherwise, we're actually saying you're not a part of this family, you're existing outside our values, you know, permanently. Now telling a child this, we're doing two things at once. Firstly, we're reorienting them, and nothing orients better than an authentically stated, deeply held value.
And the second, we're creating the family values, a pillar around which a child can orbit. We're clarifying for them what our family does and does not do, and act the way in which we act. Michelangelo was often asked how he could possibly have carved the Statue of David.
It was just too beautiful, too gorgeous, too perfect. His response was that he actually didn't carve David. What he did was take away that which was not of David.
In other words, he didn't carve it, he revealed it. He had a picture of the archetypal image that he wanted to create out of the marble. And with that very clear image in mind, he set about taking away that which was not a part of that image.
This provides us with a wonderful metaphor for parenting. Like Michelangelo, who created David by taking away that excess marble in which this glorious figure was encased, we, as parents, can help our children to become who they are, or define themselves and our family by taking away that which is not of our family. By clarifying to our kids what our family does and does not say, and what we try to not say and do, we strip away all that excess behavioral material and reveal for them in a clear and firm and concrete manner what is our core values as a family.
This sets us on much firmer ground. Our discipline can now serve as guidance rather than simply as punishment. Otherwise, we get stuck in a heated, cyclical battle with our children.
When we equate discipline with punishment, we may end up thinking we're being too harsh. Then we swing the other way and become too tentative with our discipline. The result? With all this waffling, we don't communicate clearly to our kids what we expect of them.
Then, when they don't follow our rules or requests, which were imprecise to begin with because we were unclear about how we actually felt about them, we overreact and we become overly strict. This causes our kids to overreact, in turn, sending us into the kind of monster parent mode. Seeing discipline as parental guidance or taking away that which is not of our family rather than simply as punishment helps temper disciplinary interactions between parent and child.
One dad I worked with says everything changes after you get it that when you apply discipline you don't have to back off because you don't want to be punitive or come on too hard because you're fed up. I feel a wonderful new freedom when I swoop in. If your child makes a comment, uses a bad word, or does something that's not okay to a sibling, for example, and you correct or redirect them, you are chiseling away at that which is not of your family.
Each time you do that, you're revealing what you stand for as a family. Considering core family values might seem like a sort of lofty inquiry, but the truth is actually it's quite simple. A good place to start is with one or two key values such as maybe respect or empathy.
Because every time a child is disrespectful to you or a sibling or someone outside the family, you can hold that up as an affront to your highest core value and return to that value again and again. Not just when the behavior is extremely disrespectful, but even when it's just beginning to get off the rails a little bit. The saying, don't sweat the small stuff, I don't think really applies a lot in parenting.
Parenting is all about calmly and firmly noticing and acting on the small stuff. While no one is suggesting we become sort of neurotic nags, we must plant disciplinary seeds because from little things, big things grow, to quote one of my favorite singers, Paul Kelly. When a child steps over the line, departing from one of these key family values, it's so important that we guide them back.
They need regular reorientation. If a child is pushing you and you feel that your family values are being challenged, it's really important and correct to stand firmly and unequivocally. And this does two things.
It immediately reorients a child and it reinforces your family values. Now, I want to just pick up on two themes. One is, and the main one, is this theme of taking away that which is not of your family.
And I want to add to the picture that I just mentioned that I took from the biography of Michelangelo called The Agony and the Ecstasy. If you're looking for where you can find that, it's in that book. But a little while after reading that book, and it was after I finished writing The Soul Discipline book, I was visiting in an artist's colony, it was called.
It was a cooperative of artists, ceramicists, stone carvers. And there was someone working with marble. And I thought, oh my goodness, I've never seen anyone do that.
So I watched her for some time working as she was with the carvings. And she said two things when I got to talking to her. She was very kind in talking to me as she was working.
She said to me, because I asked her about this, how is it to be carving like this? And I said to her, do you have an idea of the shape that you have before you start? And she said, well, yeah, I do. I do have an idea of the shape. Because unless I had an idea of the shape, just not very good things happen.
And I said, oh, really? And she said, yeah, over there. And she pointed. And there was a whole bunch.
And she called it the boneyard. And she said, see all that stuff over there? And she said, that's because I didn't have a clear enough idea of what I wanted to do before I started doing it. I thought, gosh, how interesting.
Because I'm always thinking of educating and parenting. And she just didn't have this vision like Michelangelo had. And she didn't have what I would call the core picture, the core value of what she wanted to create.
And it ended up amorphous and not much use to anyone in a boneyard. But then she said something else fascinating. She said, but you know what? I started doing a bunch of sketches.
And I could see, because they're up on the walls. And she said, but I had to actually take into account the grain of the marble. Now, I didn't know marble had grain.
But it does, apparently. And she said, because I've got this picture of how I want it to be. And then I start in.
And then I realize the marble wants to take it into a slightly different direction. And you've got to go with that. Otherwise, you'll break it.
And you go with it. And then you guide it back so that it still holds the basic shape of what you wanted. But it also takes into account where the stone wanted to go.
I thought, my goodness, that is so like parenting. Because children come into our lives. And we have our values, right? All right, good.
And they might be to have a quiet, peaceful life, just for example. But, you know, into our lives comes this fiery little character who's not going to give us a quiet and peaceful life. Well, maybe when they're asleep, but that's it.
You know, they're just more exuberant. Now, then one has to... The reason we wanted that quiet life is we want a life of perhaps of peacefulness, but also a place where we can respect each other. So we go with our child's exuberance.
This is one example of many. But we still don't give up on wanting our lives to be centered, which is a part of the peacefulness, right? Our family to have a centered, calm place to return to. So we just don't go with his or her or their exuberance and just, you know, go with that so much so that they just get kind of crazy, you know, and nervous and anxious because there's no boundaries.
But at the same time, we have to guide them back, do you see? And so since the writing of this Soul of Discipline book, this whole idea of children will come with their own grain, their own way of being. But it doesn't mean we let go of the values and of our core picture, but we take their personalities and their temperament into account, but still hold true to the vision. Hmm.
Okay, so that's it for this three-part series in Discipline. I chose some of my favorite parts of this book to read out. Again, just a quick mention of the Discipline and Guidance training that I personally lead coming right on up.
And if you are not a care professional yourself and you know someone who is or an educator, let them know. Let them know because anyone who's helping parents, I want to help them help the parents. And anything I can do to do that, I'm thrilled to do.
Okay, that's it for now. I hope that was helpful. Bye-bye.
