A Discipline Method That Works: 1 2 3 Magic
The hardest part of being a parent is the discipline. On one hand, you love your kids and don’t want to have to punish them. On the other hand, they can be rotten little hellions and you don’t want to see them blossom into full grown hellions. Thus it is your job to intervene and train them up to be good upstanding members of society, whatever that means these days.
For those parents out there that have strong willed children, I feel your pain, discipline is about 10 times harder than normal. Parents that don’t have strong willed children don’t seem to understand this and probably never will. As a parent of a strong willed child, I’ve been through a lot of different methods that all seemed to fail miserably. Some might say that you just need to let them grow out of this “phase” without realizing that it means that both parent and child will suffer for months/years as the child continues this behavior. Your kids are only little once and you want to enjoy that time.
It was this desire to enjoy our kids that my wife and decided to give one more method a try. This method was recommended to us by a local Psychologist and is by Dr. Thomas Phelon. The name of the program/method is 1-2-3 Magic.
The DVD we watched was right about 2 hours long and I’ll admit that I was a bit skeptical and probably would have preferred to be watching a movie or playing a game. I won’t explain the system completely as I’d probably do a crappy job compared to Dr. Phelon. What I will tell you is that after 1 day on the program I haven’t gotten mad or yelled at my son one time. Instead of going to timeout multiple times and baiting us into fight after fight, he’s virtually gotten right in line and things are going great.
Obviously, the success of the system can’t be judged immediately, but I can tell you that I was happier yesterday than I have been in a long time. I wasn’t stressed out and I wasn’t grumpy. I know this sounds like a paid advertisement for this product, but rest assured that this is my own personal opinion of the product based on my own personal experience.
I’ll be sure to make a followup post about how things are going with this method in a few weeks. If you’d like more information on the 1 2 3 Magic program, you can go the the Parent Magic website. The first DVD will set you back about $40, but I bet you can borrow it from the library.
A personal thanks goes out to Dr. Phelon for this program.
13 Dec 2007 10:56 am Chris 1 comment
This sounds awesome! I too have a stubborn and strong willed child (hrmmm.. wonder where that comes from!?!?). I will have to look into this.