A significant developmental goal for children involves moving from external sources of control and direction to internal ones. Self-regulation and self-direction are what we refer to as internal discipline. A young child has urges and impulses that press for immediate action. Children can also feel emotionally overwhelmed and unable to problem solve solutions or calm themselves. Parents provide structure and supervision to insure safety, but do it with a mind toward promoting the transfer of that regulation to the child as he or she can demonstrate an ability to assume it. Limits on behavior exist for safety and the bases for those limits are explained, as children are able to understand them.
The involvement of the child in altering those limits through demonstrated competence and self-regulation provides for a dynamic, respectful, and growth-promoting environment. Despite their grumblings, adolescents feel secure in the knowledge that there are limits to protect them, yet simultaneously view them as markers for their own growth – when those limits change in response to their development of greater self-regulation and internal discipline. As adolescents leave home and head off to college or live on their own, they will be successful if they have learned to set meaningful goals and self-limit in order to pursue those goals.
Effective parents teach children to delay immediate (impulsive) gratification by showing that it is possible to wait, that greater value can come from the wait, and that strategies can be learned to help make the wait tolerable. They applaud persistence and effort, rather than rightness or comparisons. Essentially, they serve as the child’s yet undeveloped cortex, which plans ahead and makes judgments with those future goals in mind; that links behaviors with consequences; that considers multiple concerns and options simultaneously. By showing the child this process of planning and regulating, the child learns the steps necessary to doing it for herself, a developmental process that must wait on structural brain development, yet has the plasticity to be formed by effective practice. Parents model problem solving in challenging situations; involve children in problem solving; and ultimately transfer that problem solving process to the child as she shows that she can handle it herself.
By hearing the parental voice of reasoning through the learning process, the child incorporates that voice, as part of her own self-reflecting. By asking questions, a parent can encourage the development of self-reflection and self-regulation. Although it may begin with after-the-fact-analyses of what happened, gradually the child learns to bring that thinking into the present, thus using it to self-regulate.
Encouraging interests, goal setting, and mastery promotes the development of internal incentives that fuel a child’s wish to self-regulate and pursue meaningful, satisfying goals, while saying “no” to outside forces and internal urges that push for immediate action. Within the context of parental support and encouragement, a child develops a “can-do” attitude that leads to setting worthy goals; taking on the challenges necessary to accomplish those goals; and soothing herself as she sustains that necessary, but difficult engagement.
