Based on the book “The Soul of Discipline” by Simplicity Parenting author Kim John Payne, Discipline and Guidance Parent Groups are about making parenting easier and more fulfilling for your entire family.

What looks like misbehavior is actually your children’s signal that they’re feeling lost, that they are trying to find direction and looking to you to guide them back on course.

Kim John Payne, The Soul of Discipline

As a Simplicity Parenting: Discipline & Guidance Group Leader, I offer parents, caregivers and educators the opportunity to deepen their understanding of discipline through the lens of child developmental stages. In our workshops, available both in person in Guelph, Ontario and online – you will experience a facilitated learning opportunity, and connect with others to form a peer support network of like-minded adults in your community.

As a mother of two teenagers, and a primary school Administrator, I have first hand experience of the ups and downs of behaviour at school and home, and the positive impact of parent and caregiver education in child development on child wellbeing and outcomes. Informed parents and educators, supported by a network of connected and engaged peers and mentors, results in supportive communities in which all children can thrive.

There are 3 different workshops, which can be taken on their own, or as a series:

The Simplicity Parenting approach to discipline is based on understanding a child’s needs and developmental stages, and seeks to provide guidance through coming together and strengthening a family’s values rather than through conflict and punishment.

A few words from Kim John Payne…

The transcript of the above video is found below:

DEFINING VALUES

A question that often comes up is, “I want to be close and loving to my child, but how can I get over the feeling that discipline will push us apart?”

If we can reframe discipline so that when we’re in those moments when discipline is being applied and we need to give guidance to our kids and things aren’t going so well and some of the the things they’re doing are just not what we want in our family at all, then we step in.

What we’re doing is actually defining family values. We’re not, in a sense, being cold or in some ways distancing ourselves from our kids, it’s that we’re defining what our family stands for – what it does stand for, what it does not stand for. It’s a moment where the family grows strong, not actually weaker.

The metaphor that really struck me is, once I was reading, I was going to teach history to some kids and I was reading a biography of Michaelangelo actually, and in that book, he was asked how did he carve the statue of David.

He answered, “Actually, I didn’t carve David. I took away that which was not David.”

And that really struck me because he saw the shape in the stone and he simply just took away what didn’t comply, really, to that vision that he had.

And the reason I think that’s a pretty reasonably good metaphor for parenting is that we’re always, through discipline, taking that which is not of our family, that which we don’t stand for, that which we don’t really want.

So, discipline as a way of defining family, it’s a way of reframing that is very helpful to remember.