a loving approach to setting limits & raising an emotionally intelligent child

Mindful Discipline

“Do not doubt your own basic goodness. In spite of all confusion and fear, you are born with a heart that knows what is just, loving, and beautiful.”

Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace

Parenthood is perhaps the most profound and rewarding experience of our lives. But it can also be one of the most challenging.

Most of us want the joys of being a parent to endure forever, but the work of parenting is another story. We all hope that one day our kids will begin wiping their own butts, get along with each other, and engage with their work with a growing steadfastness and sense of purpose.

But how do we help our children become self-disciplined without

Closing them down emotionally?

Dousing their desire to “do the right thing” on their own?

Stunting their development and maturation?

Ruining the relationship along the way?

“…a wonderful integration of the power of mindful awareness and the insights from studies of child development and the brain

to lovingly guide us to a more rewarding and effective way of being as parents.”

Daniel J. Siegel, MD

Mindful Discipline

is a loving approach to creating harmony in your home while still helping your child thrive and develop into their full potential.

Part

A Discipline We Can Feel Proud Of

Introduction

1. WHY DISCIPLINE MATTERS - The Key to a Healthy Mind and a Fulfilling Life

2. HOW SELF-DISCIPLINE DEVELOPS - Growing From Impulses to Judgments to Authenticity

3. MINDFULNESS - Nourishment for Life and Parenting

4. THE MINDFUL DISCIPLINE APPROACH - Transmitting Self-Discipline

5. RELATIONSHIP - The Source of Nourishment

“I love this book. I wish it were packaged with every pregnancy test.”

Dean Ornish M.D.

Part

The Five Essential Elements of Mindful Discipline

6. UNCONDITIONAL LOVE - Preserving Trust and Inherent Value

7. SPACE - Supporting Autonomy, Competence, and Responsibility

8. MENTORSHIP - Promoting Healthy Habits, Strong Values, and Emotional Intelligence

9. HEALTHY BOUNDARIES - Encouraging Impulse Control and Adaptability

10. MIS-TAKES - The Gifts of Compassion, Humility, and Forgiveness

11. THE HEART OF MATURITY - How Emotional Intelligence and Resilience Are Grown

12. EPILOGUE

“…this deeply wise book shows parents how to nourish both self-discipline and self-worth inside the children they love. Grounded in research, full of personal examples, and loaded with down-to-earth suggestions, this book is a gem.”

Rick Hanson, PhD, author of Hardwiring Happiness

Part

A DISCIPLINE AND THE BRAIN

B THE BASICS OF ATTACHMENT

C QUALITIES AND CAPACITIES OF A HEALTHY, SELF-DISCIPLINED INDIVIDUAL

D THE PROMISE AND PERILS OF PRAISE

REFERENCES

Appendices

Mindful Discipline:

A Loving Approach to Setting Limits and Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child

Foreword by Christine Carter PhD

Are you happy all the time? Do you ever yell at your kids? Because I write and speak about raising happy kids professionally, these are questions that parents ask me all the time. Here’s the answer: No, I don’t even try to be happy all the time. My goal is to be mindful as much of the time as possible. And yes, I do yell at my kids sometimes—but only when I’m not parenting mindfully.

Synthesizing ancient insights from the East with modern science and psychological knowledge, Drs. Shauna Shapiro and Chris White have created a beautifully clear, comprehensive and practical guide for the type of mindful parenting that I recommend parents practice (and that I try to practice myself). Mindful Discipline is a step-by-step guide to parenting with greater wisdom and compassion. Think of it as an invitation to use the focus of your mind, and the compassionate love in your heart, to raise happy children and find greater joy in your parenting.

As parents we want nothing more than to help our children grow into their best and brightest selves, to persevere in the pursuit of their dreams, and be good and decent people who want to make the world a better place. But what do they need from us in order to get there?

There is a mountain of information out there about how best to parent. Some approaches make discipline the central issue, but espousing harsh, intimidating, and controlling methods to keep the child in line. In reaction to this authoritarian approach, others have said that children need no limits at all, that discipline is a dirty word that need not be uttered around children. This permissive approach claims we should leave them be and they will grow up to be kind and responsible. But both permissive and authoritarian approaches misunderstand what true discipline is and how it develops. This book clarifies what healthy self-discipline is, why it is important, and outlines the essential forms of nourishment that help children develop it.

Best known for her weekly Happiness Tips, Christine Carter, Ph.D., draws on psychology, sociology, and neuroscience—and uses her own real-world adventures—to demonstrate happiness do’s and don’ts in action. Dr. Carter is a sociologist at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and the author of RAISING HAPPINESS: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. She teaches happiness classes online throughout the year to a global audience on her website www.christinecarter.com.

parenting discipline

Mindful Discipline:

A Loving Approach to Setting Limits and Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child

Listen to the Audio book or Audio CD versions.

Narrated by Joell A. Jacob

Foreword by Dean Ornish, M.D.

I love this book. I wish it were packaged with every pregnancy test.

Often, we are presented with false choices. Is it fun for me or is it good for me? Well, why not both?

Should I be a tiger mom who strictly disciplines and represses my kids or a free spirit who coddles my child? Well, neither.

In Mindful Discipline, Drs. Shauna Shapiro and Chris White eloquently present a third, middle path— a relationship centered approach that combines unconditional love and healthy boundaries and provides mentorship and space in a nurturing environment that allows for making mistakes as a pathway to wisdom.

This remarkable book weaves together ancient wisdom teachings with modern science to provide new perspectives on parenting, discipline, and what is needed to raise a healthy, emotionally intelligent, and joyful child.

Discipline can be limiting or liberating, depending on the intention and awareness behind it. When we consciously choose to limit what we’re doing, it liberates us.

Discipline provides freedom if it’s freely chosen because it enables us to do things and to express ourselves in ways that we otherwise might not be able to do. For example, musicians practicing scales may feel it’s a little tedious at times, but the scales enable them to express themselves more freely by playing beautiful music.

For almost forty years, I have directed a series of clinical research studies proving that comprehensive lifestyle changes may reverse the progression of coronary heart disease, early- stage prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic diseases. These lifestyle changes include healthy nutrition; increasing exercise, yoga, and meditation; and having more love and social support.

More recently, we found that when you change your lifestyle, it changes hundreds of your genes— turning on good genes that keep us healthy, and turning off genes that promote a variety of chronic diseases— in only a few months. We also found that these lifestyle changes begin to lengthen telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live, thus beginning to reverse aging on a cellular level. All of these lifestyle changes are powerful, but it takes real discipline to put them into practice.

Over the years, I’ve learned that in addition to these intrinsic benefits of changing lifestyle, having the discipline to choose not to do something imbues action with deep meaning and purpose, making it sacred— that is, the most meaningful, and the most joyful.

If it’s meaningful, it’s sustainable. “I feel deprived because I can’t eat this food” is not sustainable. “I’m choosing not to eat this food because what I gain is so much more than I give up” is sustainable.

That’s what the most enlightened spiritual teachers have taught through the millennia: how to live a joyful life, right here and now.

Mindful Discipline offers a revolutionary perspective on parenting. It reframes our understanding of what discipline means, identifying the healthy dimensions that are essential to well- being— from learning self- regulation and impulse control as a child to making wise lifestyle choices as an adult.

The teachings that underlie each chapter are presented with an open handed invitation for all parents to grow individually alongside their children, and to learn to trust both their own and their children’s innate wisdom. The authors also share their personal journeys with parenting as illustrations of the principles they discuss and demonstrations of how the cultivation of loving, mindful discipline serves the entire family.

Our social connections, beginning with the relationship between parent and child, are fundamental to health and happiness. Study after study has shown that social support— a research euphemism for love and intimacy— is perhaps the most important determinant of our health and well- being. People who are lonely, depressed, and isolated are three to ten times more likely to get sick and die prematurely than those who have a strong sense of love and community.

How we raise our children is a primary determinant of their capacity for love and intimacy. Drs. Shapiro and White recognize that deeply loving, attuned, courageous, and compassionate parenting facilitates health, well- being, and the capacity for self- discipline in children.

This kind of parenting is optimally supported by the practice of mindfulness, or the development of moment-by-moment attention and presence. It is from this place of centeredness and emotional clarity that parents learn to make the “disciplined” choices that best facilitate fulfilling relationships with their children while promoting the child’s healthy development. As parents, meditation can help us quiet down our minds to be able to hear the still, small voice within that speaks clearly but quietly. We learn to trust our inner wisdom to help guide and refine our parenting in every moment.

At the deepest level, it is this loving presence that underlies all health, from our children to our families to our world, and it is this loving presence from which calm and centered discipline emerges. Mindful Discipline shows us how.

Dean Ornish, M.D. Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco Author, The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health

“This finely and sensitively written book points to the fragility and resilience of a child’s soul and demonstrates so clearly how in need each child is of an equally fragile and resilient adult’s guidance. An adult, however, having been on the Earth much longer, has been able to add experience to the fragility and resilience and thus becomes the author of the child’s life until he or she is experienced enough to become the author himself or herself. This beautiful book is a wonderful guide to parents who wish to lovingly, mindfully, and clearly accompany their children at the beginning of their life journey.”

Meinir Davies, management and teaching team coordinator at the New Village School, Sausalito, CA

We start by getting clear on our terms: What is discipline? What is self-discipline? What is emotional intelligence? What is resilience?

Then we answer important questions like, Why self-discipline matters? How does it develop? What can we do as parents to support it?

And then we bring the essentials into focus: What is mindfulness? How can it help us as parents? How does it help us approach common discipline encounters with our children?

And finally we go into specific applications of each of the five essential elements, unconditional love, space, mentorship, healthy boundaries, and mis-takes, and provide practices for each.

Epilogue

One definition of discipline is “the creation of greater order.”

There is some mysterious force in the universe that opposes entropy, a dynamic intelligence that moves inexorably toward greater and greater degrees of wholeness, complexity, and order. Moment by moment, our children’s brains and bodies are being wired up by this intelligence. We don’t see the miraculous process of integration going on beneath the surface. Instead, we see our child smile back at us for the first time. We see her light up with pride as she lumbers across the living room into our outstretched arms. We hear her say things so surprising and unexpectedly wise that we stop in our tracks, forced to look more closely at the little girl we thought we knew. Growing up is the most normal thing in the world; it just also happens to be one of the most miraculous.

Development has its own momentum. We do not need to be sculptors working day and night, chiseling away at our children as if they were made of stone. We have been asked to tend to our seed-child as a gardener. We engage wholeheartedly, yet also practice non-attachment. We trust the process and the different seasons, and do our best to align our actions with the intelligent unfolding of life.

We parents have been invited to serve this miraculous unfolding—to  support our little ones in becoming fully themselves and bringing their gifts to the world. The love we have for our children draws us beyond ourselves moment after moment, day after day. We too are being grown up—mademore whole—throughevery aspect of this relationship: the overwhelm, the sweetness, and sometimes the unbearable heartbreak of loving another so profoundly.

Here is the bottom line: There is no perfect parenting. There is no one right way to do it. This book is, above all, an invitation to trust life, and to welcome mindfulness as your discipline. Each moment you choose to become aware of your breath, of your body, of your child, and of the entire texture of “now,” is a moment of mindful presence: the greatest giftyou can give your family. We hope that after reading this book you have greater trust in yourself, in your child, and in the intelligence that is living and breathing you, now and always.

Mindful Discipline:

A Loving Approach to Setting Limits and Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child