by Hugh M. Lewis

"To end the discipline war, it is imperative to stay out of power struggles and create an atmosphere where the long-range effects for both children and adults are mutual respect, accountability, responsibility, self-discipline, resourcefulness, and cooperation in solving problems. It is important to see mistakes as opportunities--to learn and to solve problems." (Nelson, 1996: 81)

The book Positive Discipline (Nelson, Ballantine Books, New York: 1996) elaborates the approach developed and advocated by Alfred Adler through the work and writing of the author Jane Nelson. Jane Nelson has promoted this framework for teaching and socialization of children through her own research and speaking, and she has written a series of books on related topics that has enjoyed both national and international success.

Alfred Adler was a pioneer psychiatrist contemporaneous with Sigmund Freud. He founded the school of individual psychology that embraced a comprehensive science of living emphasizing the uniqueness of the individual and social relationship. To a great extent, conventional psychiatry was dominated by Freudian psychoanalysis which orientation tended to eclipse and obscure the work of Adler that in many ways was diametrically opposed to the tenets of psychoanalytic therapy. Over time, a revision of the conventional psychoanalytic framework has led to a broader reconciliation with Adlerian approaches through a variety of later schools of psychiatric thought and method.

Born in Vienna, Adler was early on a social reformer who contributed regularly to socialist periodicals. He was invite by Freud in 1902 to join the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, a small and elite discussion group. Adler joined the group but was not a disciple of Freud. Adler rejected Freud's psychosexual theories of human nature, and sought instead to define humanity in terms of what made people different from machines or animals. Hence he adopted an early humanistic perspective upon human nature. By 1911 he diverged so much in his thinking from Freud that he resigned from the Vienna circle and initiated his own school.

Adler served 3 years in WWI in a military hospital, and in 1919 he organized a child-guidance clinic in Vienna and became a lecturer in a pedagogical institute. He was the first psychiatrist to apply principles of mental hygiene in schools. He worked with teachers in child-guidance clinics where he carried out innovative approaches that included the teacher and parent as well as the child--perhaps the first community psychiatry and family therapy on record. (Ansbacher, A. Adler, McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography, 1973: 54) Adler immigrated to the United States in 1932 to escape the threat of the Nazi's. In the U.S. he went on many lecturing tours and engaged in teaching.

Adler's approach was centered in individual psychology that dealt as much as possible with observable behavior without making untestable inferences about behavior. This approach lent itself to basic, everyday language and to clear case-examples. Its principles are interrelated, and deal with a wide range of individual issues, normal and abnormal, physical and psychological, individual and group. The theory focused on the individual as a holistic and synergistic organism in which the many components interfunctioned and were subordinated to the interests of the person as a whole being. Adler believed that human beings were naturally goal-driven that motivated people to strive. There was no need to postulate a deeper source of energy or drive for the human personality. All people naturally strive for success, significance, perfection, overcoming the challenges of their life. These goals are differently interpreted by different people. The central goal structure of an individual is the root of their personality, and in order to understand this is to seek the purpose that drives a person. People may respond to challenges with differential feelings of discouragement, overcompensation or encouragement. Subjective elements of personality, such as interpretation and opinion, are more decisive than imputed objective factors of personality. This self-determination derived from a person's creative power. This includes both the ability to choose alternative modes of behavioral response as well as spontaneous reaction or initiation, through which an individual develops and learns their "style of life." Though individuals have an inherent unpredictability and uncertainty of response, there is also a certain unique consistency of personality that gives coherence and unity in the individual's expression of oneself, and becomes that individual's life style.

Children learn to monitor and evaluate their impressions and experiences in relation to others in their world. Children in time become enculturated and socialized within certain parameters of practical constraints, selective perceptions, habitual responses, and values and sanctions of society, at which time the individual arrives at a consistent style of life that is associated with that individual throughout life.

The individual does not exist in isolation, but in a field of shifting and changing social relations. The individual's life is therefore not only a unique whole, but also a part of a larger context of social interactions. People are thus constrained fundamentally by their social ties to this larger context. According to Adler, there are three main tasks of life: occupation, association with others, love and marriage. These become in later psychological evaluation as criteria for the adaptive fitness of individuals. These are social ties requiring cooperation for their adaptive resolution. Parents and caretakers become critical therefore in helping to define and mold a child's style of life.

Adler used the term "social interest" to designate an innate capacity for dealing with society. It must be elicited and developed in an individual. Its subjective side must be developed through native empathy. Its objective side is the capacity for cooperation with others. This interest is first demonstrated in the mother-child bond. Social interest entails therefore a transcendence of self and an absence of self-centeredness. It is a trait something like intelligence, and thus influences the direction of human striving and pattern of human life-style. Social interest is, according to Adler, the basis for mental health, based upon his clinical observations that healthy individuals demonstrate a developed social interest. Life "failures" experience intense feelings of inferiority that keep them bound within themselves and self-centered. They may develop an inferiority complex or adopt idiosyncratic or destructive goals of striving that are discordant with common sense. They develop a kind of pampered style of life expecting to receive without giving. Normality is equivalent to maturity when it involves the development away from dependency and helplessness and toward greater social interest and responsibility.

The purpose of psychiatric therapy therefore is to divine the basis for the "error" in the patient's way of life and to provide the patient with a new road toward greater maturity. In the development of therapies, Adler utilized a theory of dreams, the meaning of early childhood memories, and birth order as important diagnostic devices. Self-understanding achieved is not so much depth of personality as it is the totality of the individual's life context, allowing the individual to re-envision oneself in relation to the world. Adler emphasized the importance of the realization of self-determination in the individual and the power to encourage it. "To encourage the patient, the therapist must express a disinterested concern that evokes and fosters feelings of trust and fellowship--fulfilling a function at which the mother had failed." (ibid., 55)

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Jane Nelson's point of departure in this book is to look especially at the Post-World War II baby boom generation as being caught in a kind of rural-urban transition. The old extended family support networks of rural community settings gave way to a trend toward nuclear atomization in suburban households. The sense of independence and individualism was exaggerated in such conditions. This may have led in many instances to the poor use of punishment and discipline in child rearing in the home, and to the lack of communicative context by which better socialization and learning strategies for children's behavior could be promoted. These trends resulted in the reaction of children to poor parenting skills and to poor development and socialization later in life.

Part of the change, according to Nelson, is that the parent as a role model for submission and obedience, and, I would say, for nurturing and aggressiveness, was lost. Especially shaken was the traditional paternalism of "Father Knows Best" with the increasing importance of the role of the mother in the workplace and as an independent breadwinner for the family. I would say that this trend is also correlated with the rise of broken and single parent homes and of divorce rates and mixed family arrangements.

Another part of this change was the loss of the role of the child as a responsible contributor to the domestic economy of the household. As many might complain, Children have been taught a new culture of permissive laziness, and no longer know how to work. These kinds of changes are documented ethnographically with children.

The consequence was the tendency to push child rearing to either extreme, towards strict rigidity and control, or else towards totally relaxed permissiveness that allowed children to do whatever they pleased. Children thus were taught to direct energy towards strategies of manipulation, rebellion or avoidance. Children on average did not develop the seven life skills relating to development of self-reliance: 1. Strong sense of personal capability: 2. Significance of primary relationships; 3. Personal power in life; 4. Intrapersonal skills; 5. Interpersonal skills; 6 Systematic skills and; 7 Strong judgmental skills.

According to Nelson, therefore, the strategy toward positive discipline that involves "firmness with respect," "Freedom with order," "limited choices," and "bound within limits showing respect for all" (1996: 7) serves as an intermediate and effective alternative toward either extreme of too much discipline (strictness) or none at all (permissiveness). Punishment is a short-range strategy that in the long run backfires by encouraging resentment, revenge, rebellion and retreat into manipulation, deception and undercutting of self-esteem. Positive discipline is therefore the discipline without the punishment. It is based upon mutual respect and cooperation, incorporating firmness with dignity as a foundation for developing life skills and an inner locus of control. (ibid., 15) It teaches therefore self-discipline and responsibility in a child. Allowing children some measure of contribution in establishing their own rules and guidelines for behavior increases their cooperation and willingness to obey the rules set down for them.

In the approach to positive discipline, Nelson emphases the Adlerian approach to "winning children over" versus adults "winning over children." Thus, the fundamentals to this approach are that 1. Children are social beings, in whom self-identity is defined through social relationship; 2. Behavior is goal-oriented; 3. A child's primary goal is to feel that they belong and are significant in their social context; 4. Misbehavior is the sign of a discouraged child; 5. The development of a person's sense of "social interest" as the basis for positive development and health; 6. Equality of the child as a human being with equivalent needs, rights and interests; 7. Don't be afraid of making mistakes, as long as we can learn from them; 8. Communicate the message of love effectively.

Mistakes provide learning opportunities on the road to recovery. She highlights the "three R's of recovery": recognize the mistake, reconcile the consequences of the error, resolve to do better. One approach Nelson adopted was the development of social interest in children through peer counseling in fifth and sixth-grade students that encouraged leadership, social responsibility and commitment. She adopted the five-step method of William Glasser's "reality therapy" including: 1. Making friends; 2. What, who, when, how, where, why the problem; 3. Does the behavior work, is it helpful or not; 4. Can a better way be found; 5. Commitment to a better way.

Nelson's book goes on to discuss the significance of birth order in shaping the views and behavior of children and adults. She cites the "four mistaken goals of behavior" that were discovered by Rudolf Dreikurs, a disciple of Adler, that children who get discouraged adopt as a rationalization for behavior: 1. Attention: attracting attention to oneself, even if in a negative way, is the only way of belonging: 2. Power: always winning or being in control, or not letting someone else win or be in control, or being a sore loser, is the only way of belonging; 3. Revenge: Because failing to belong hurts, hurting back becomes the only way of belonging; 4. Assumed inadequacy: It is impossible to belong, therefore failure and inferiority is the only way of belonging. In this model the primary goal of all behavior is towards a sense of significance achieved through belonging. Discouragement comes from feelings of not belonging and insignificance. Mistaken beliefs will be different in relation to the four mistaken goals. Mistaken beliefs and rationalizations lead to the adoption of one of the mistaken goals and result in misbehavior. Therefore, if we can identify the mistaken goal, we can identify the means for effective action in getting children to achieve their true goal. One means of identifying the mistaken goal of a child is to identify the adult's feeling responses and reactions toward that child, varying according to the goals the child is trying to achieve. Frustration and anger are secondary responses that cover over our primary feelings. Another means of identifying the goals of a child is to observe their pattern response once they are made to stop their behavior. Each of the mistaken goals has a proactive strategy of encouragement designed to get the child to see and slowly change their goals and associated behaviors. Revealing to the child the basis of their mistaken goals is a way of helping them to become self-aware of their mistaken beliefs and hence achieve an initial degree of self-control and self-determination. The mistaken goals and behavior of a child may be partially determined by both the temperament of the child and by the degree of discouragement experienced by the child, with attention being the least discouraged and inadequacy the most discouraged.

The method of objectively employing logical and natural consequences is proposed as a healthy alternative to punishment. "Piggy-backing" a child is not allowed. Spanking a child for playing in the street as a means of inducing the child to avoid the dangers of doing so is such a form of "piggy-backing" through undue punishment. Explaining to the child the consequences of playing in the street is a way of employing natural consequences. Natural consequences are the obvious and unavoidable results of some behavior. Merely pointing out these consequences is a means of demonstrating and permitting a child's sense of self-determination and self-control over the consequences of behavior. Logical consequences require mediation of other people, and I believe involve the determination of viable alternative choices or tradeoffs of different behavioral strategies. The three Rs of logical consequences are that the alternatives are; 1. Related: 2. Respectful: 3. Reasonable. "Time out" is a good logical consequence if the child is trained beforehand and knows what to expect and how to do time out, and that the control of time out is in the hands of the child when they feel respectful, etc.

The basis of the strategy for teaching positive discipline is the effective use of encouragement, based upon the belief that the misbehaving child is essentially a good child who is discouraged and mistaken in one's beliefs and behaviors. Encouragement restores self-control and self-respect in a child. How to teach through positive encouragement is the basis for the approach to positive discipline. Developing skills in positive encouragement is not always a simple or straightforward task, especially for adults who are more skilled in negative reinforcement. Steps to skillful encouragement of children may include: 1. Timing out: 2. Winning cooperation through development of mutual understanding and sharing of thoughts and feelings, or effective and open communication: 3. Development of mutual respect involving faith in one's own and other's capabilities: 4. Showing interest and appreciation of other's points of view, and acceptance of responsibility for one's contributions: 5. Working towards improvement rather than perfection in a relative sense: 6. Redirecting misbehavior toward positively structured goals: 7. Making up for misdirected behavior by positive, proactive behavior that involves children in problem-solving processes: 8. Overcoming social pressure or sanctions: providing special or "quality" time for a child: 9. Providing encouragement over praise or criticism. Methods for encouraging children to learn and improve their behavior include taking time for training, inviting self-evaluation, building on strengths instead of weaknesses, teaching a tolerance for mistakes as learning opportunities, asking questions of children to invite their input, and giving children hugs.

Within this framework, long term results of positive discipline culminate through providing regular class or family meetings through which the seven significant perceptions and skills of building self-esteem and competency can be most highly developed. Students with problems can be put on a regular class-meeting schedule, preferably on a daily basis. It is important not to use such meetings as the basis for moralizing or lecturing or as a basis for continuing excessive control. Use the first four meetings to teach the skills for the eight building blocks for effective class meetings in order to avoid the first "hell month" of class meetings: 1. Forming a circle: 2. Practicing compliments and appreciation: 3. Creating an agenda: 4. Developing communication skills: 5. Learning separate realities of individuals: 6. Solving problems through role-playing and brainstorming: 7. Recognizing the four reasons people do what they do: 8. Applying logical consequences and non-punitive solutions. (ibid. 135-6) The four purposes of class meetings are: 1. To compliment: 2. To give mutual help: 3. To solve problems: 4. To plan events. The main goals of class meetings, that can be reiterated at the beginning of each meeting, is to give mutual support and solve problems. Other goals include teaching mutual respect and discussing situations demonstrating disrespect: giving compliments, acknowledgments and appreciation: teaching logical consequences: and going beyond logical consequences by focusing upon problem solutions instead of problem consequences. Nelson also provides a class list of "how-tos" for structuring class meetings: 1. Providing a set-piece agenda with an established routine: 2. Using a cooling off period of a day before introducing a problem: 3. Meeting in a circle: 4. Provide a class meeting structure that: a. Begins with compliments: b. Reads first item on the agenda: c. Passes items around the circle for comments and suggestions: d. Records all suggestions as given: e. Reads all suggestions before requesting student (or students) to make a decision: f. Ask the student for a commitment of when one will do whatever one has chosen to do. (ibid., 143-4). Nelson also suggests using secret pals, appointment of a chairperson, provide students with as much capacity to plan things as possible, ending class meetings by a recess or lunch, and enforcing decisions that have been made.

Finally, Nelson provides techniques that allow us to put our positive learning strategies together. She recommends the bathroom technique (or possibly something comparable for the classroom) that provides a cooling off period (like taking walks, going shopping, etc.) Using the Novel technique, by sitting down and reading a novel during periods of conflict to leave children alone in the classroom, is an alternative to the bathroom technique. Children should know your plan and your reasons. Positive timing out or deciding what the teacher's responses will be to behavior are positive alternatives. Avoiding emotional hassles through emotional withdrawal, use established and agreed upon routines, providing agreed upon quality times, staying out of kid's fights, providing clear non-verbal cues, allowing students to respond to choices, setting up conditionals for appropriate behavior, providing incentive structures such as allowances and rewards.

In conclusion, Nelson states that the primary goal of positive discipline "is to enable both adults and children to experience more joy, harmony, cooperation, shared responsibility, mutual respect, and love in their lives and relationships." (ibid., 213) With this, we should remember several caveats to avoid detours to this goal: 1. "What we do is never as important as how we do it: " (ibid., 213) 2. Viewing mistakes as learning opportunities: (ibid., 214) 3. We must sometimes learning something over and over again, not all at once, but a little bit at a time. (ibid. 218) Positive steps toward helping a child feel like they belong is: 1. Get into the child's world: 2. Giving the child the benefit of the doubt: 3. Giving encouragement: 4. Teaching social interest: 5. Being optimistic and positive about everything: 6. Conveying unconditional love. She then provides four steps toward gaining cooperation: 1. Getting into the child's world: 2. Show understanding: 3. Sharing real feelings: 4. Work on solutions together.

"Example is the best teacher" (ibid., 225), therefore modeling on one's own behavior is the best way of teaching children cooperative and compassionate behavior. Teaching problem solving steps, help students develop a sense of responsibility, taking responsibility for oneself, having compassion for oneself, and reinforcing learning are further methods mentioned in conclusion of the positive discipline approach.

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Overall, for a given range of relatively normal behavior, a positive discipline framework for structuring classroom time and relations is itself an encouraging and enlightened methodology over the traditional attitude of "spare the rod and spoil the child" or "a candy in one hand and a cane in the other." For most human social purposes, it provides a practical and efficacious guide to development and socialization of appropriate behavior, not only for children, but for parents, teachers, and every adult as well.

The complexity of human reality suggests, anthropologically, that such an approach may not be completely sufficient for all cases, contexts or situations. In the first place, psycho-pathologies may develop early enough that effectively interfere and prevent children or adults from learning or being able to adopt positive disciplinary approaches. Children with deep-seated behavioral disorders tied to past abuses may be relatively immune or fundamentally resistant to such an approach, and prove more intractable than would normally be expected. This highlights the social aspect of negative behavior and discouragement--children and adults often have their sense of self-esteem and self-worth and their goals cut short and devalued through the victimization of others in society, either directly or indirectly through group victimization and identification.

In this case, remediation must go beyond, I believe, a person-centered approach to positive discipline that would otherwise tend to psychologize the issues involved in the manifest behavioral patterning to the neglect of sociogenic origins of such behavior. In other words, behavior that may appear as "mistaken goal" directed behavior, or simply as "misbehavior" may be entirely relative to the observers own cultural and behavioral expectations and presuppositions. Such behavior, construed within a larger context of socio-centric relations, may in fact be not "mistaken" so much as "misplaced," not rationalized so much as rational. As an anthropologist and a social scientist, I would ask the would-be positive disciplinarian to step beyond the boundaries of a person-centered approach, and to focus as well upon the problematics of achieving positive social relations and a positive sense of constructive community, addressing issues that may have occurred, or continue to occur, in the background of people's lives. Surely, there is secondary gain to be expected from the identification of victimization and the socially learned dependency that follows.

Furthermore, ample cross-cultural field evidence suggests the following caveats worthy of consideration: Chaotic or inconsistent contexts that may generate behavioral contradictions and cognitive confusion may lead to a form of field-dependency that prevents the internalization and differentiation of more developed personality structures. This pattern may itself be both culturally, socially and historically relative to the class, group and historical situation of the community in which it arises and is embedded. Even cases of extreme field independence and cognitive elaboration and articulation of style may be fundamentally misdirected in a larger socio-cultural framework. Examples of cultural inversion and the development of counter-cultures are an example of this. A strong cultural emphasis upon corporal punishment of children, within a framework of mutual social expectation, may effectively undercut a child's self esteem. But also, within the cultural framework of the existing pattern of sanctioning and constraints, it may help to solidify and reinforce an ethnocentric life-style that is consonant with the norms and behaviors of the group. Desymbolization of traditional cultural pattern, without sufficient substitutes of new forms of symbolic value or significance, can result in deep-seated, psychological manifest behaviors that result in forms of socio-pathology and impulse control disorder. If a mother was raised in a home without parental bonding, then the mother may have not learned herself how to bond with her own child. The association of these patterns furthermore with rural-urban transitions and attendant conflicts and with other basic value orientations in cultures result in differential patterns of personality development.

Therefore, I would suggest that a positive discipline framework would work best in a Euro-centric context containing average and relatively normal children and that is largely suburban and middle-class in orientation. It can be extended to a broader framework, but not without consideration and alternation of significant symbolic and cultural differentials. It is but one of a larger repertory and range of approaches that must be adopted in coordination to achieve the goals of education and socialization of the personality. On the other hand, its emphasis does provoke, I believe, interesting considerations about fundamental human nature, and possibly the shared predicament of many different people across different cultures and periods of time. If we have some kind of vision or dream of creating through education an ideal society or world, then positive discipline would have at least to be a part of that envisioned paradise, if not the main part.

I would be sure, as a teacher, and as a parent, and as a human being in the world, to adopt a positive discipline approach. I have done so with my own child. In this regard I will give a brief anecdote of the cultural relativity of such an approach. While doing fieldwork on the Jetty in a proletarian community of fisherman and stevedores, I timed out my daughter for misbehavior while conducting some interviews. This was a community in which children were normally slapped, beaten with canes or electrical wires as a routine form of punishment. In this culture, a "child" is a parent's "pain" which translates into both "love" and "punishment." In this culture as well, the local God is the "baby god" who has a whip in one hand and gives out candy to children in the other hand. Parents normally both gratify their children's demands by oral permissiveness in eating, and in the other hand punish their children with the rod. In this community, by timing out my four-year-old daughter by making her stand for a moment by a post at the end of the pier where we were working, the "uncles" I was interviewing became angry with me and accused me of being as bad as a Japanese concentration camp guard to my daughter. This community had a bad memory of the Japanese occupation during World War II. That was the only time I felt unsafe and possibly in danger on that Jetty, a place notorious for gangsters and the Chinese secret societies. In this case, a positive discipline approach was clearly interpreted culturally as "cruel and unusual punishment."