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Child-Rearing Beliefs Checklist
Directions: Mark statements with which you agree. Compare your answers 
with anyone who is helping you raise your child. Discuss answers that differ 
to reach an understanding.

Using Power Wisely

• When parents lecture, nag, plead, or yell, they upset themselves and 
  delay taking action that corrects misbehavior.

• Parents need to make the final decision in areas of children’s lives 
  that affect others or threaten safety. But, they need to allow children 
  “free will” in areas of interests, beliefs, and style.

• Children do not have to be punished for behavior that affects only 
  themselves and can be given a natural consequence such as doing 
  their own laundry when clothes are not put away.

Incentives That Require Cooperation

• Withholding all privileges until children do as they are asked is a 
  better motivator than taking away privileges to punish a child for not 
  cooperating.

• It is more effective to set a deadline for starting a chore or task than 
  to ask a child to do something immediately.

Actions That Encourage Obedience

• Punishments should be designed to teach good conduct rather than 
  to cause distress or prevent mistakes from ever happening.

• Punishments need to be intense enough to upset children but brief 
  enough to provide opportunities to show changes in past behavior.

• Consistently repeating the same punishment is better than one long 
  punishment.

• One minute per year of age is a useful guideline for the length of 
  time-out.

• Children should be told how long a restriction will last and can be 
  given a task that shows they have learned from past actions to 
  shorten the length of the restriction.

• Spankings require parents to be active while the child is passive. 
  Withholding privileges until a task is performed, time-out, essays, or 
  restrictions require children to comply.

Daily Routines, School Problems, and Moral Matters

• After demonstrating that they know how to keep their rooms neat, 
  teenagers can be allowed some leeway on bedroom cleanliness.

• When children lie, punishments should be limited to wrongdoing and 
  to help them identify the causes of dishonesty (avoiding 
  punishments, disapproval, rules, or looking bad).

• Children who are making poor grades do not have to be restricted for 
  a whole grading period if they bring home school reports showing 
  satisfactory progress.

Responses That Reduce Anger, Bad Attitudes, and Back Talk

• It is acceptable for children to express frustration with rules and 
  consequences by making faces, pouting, crying, or complaining. 
  (Cross out any that you won’t tolerate.)

• Suppressing a child’s frustrations makes them build up. Sympathizing 
  with a child’s frustrations reduces them and will not undermine 
  punishments as long as parents remain firm.

• Parents should give children a reason for their decisions but do not 
  need to make them understand the reason.

• Children do not need to understand their parents’ point of view and 
  may not be able to do so until they have followed a rule consistently.

• Parents can best fulfill their need for understanding by talking to 
  other adults, not by trying to convince their children.

• Parents need to understand their children’s point of view to make 
  good decisions.