8 Fundamental Parenting Rules

Parenting sure would be a piece of cake if kids waltzed out of the womb knowing how to behave. But since we're not that lucky, teaching them the rules of civility is our cross to bear. The tricky part: making sure they don't counterattack us in the process, which means we need to find ways to get our kids to use their own internal dialogue to follow the clear and reasonable rules of behavior that we establish. In other words, we need to get them to think their way to good behavior by getting them to comply with the rules we establish because they know it's the right thing to do, instead of following them because they're afraid we'll go ballistic and ground them until their grandchildren are potty trained.

There are several prerequisites to our discipline program that can help us accomplish this goal without too much blood, sweat and tears. If we follow them, we're sure to encourage self-direction instead of external direction in our kids: