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What are some unique, effective ways to discipline a child? Stop treating your kid like a child. No, really. I’m serious. Our son started talking early and one of his first tricks was to parrot what we said and how we said it. I know that it sounds cute — and it was in the beginning — but mostly it was maddening. We quickly realised that traditional parenting is really, really condescending. Don’t believe me? Try this experiment with your significant other: 1. Give seemingly arbitrary orders without any context or reasoning (“Don’t touch that.”) 2. Ignore feedback (“Do you want to go to the park? No? Well, we’re going to the park anyway.”) 3. Ask rhetorical questions in a passive-aggressive fashion (“Do big boys cry?”) 4. Respond to frustration with more orders (“Stop pouting.”) 5. Deny autonomy at every opportunity (“Let me do that for you. You’ll hurt yourself.”) 6. Impose arbitrary punishments (“Keep that up, and I’m taking away your car keys.”)Be serious about it, just as if you were talking to a child. If, after a week of this treatment, you and your significant other haven’t had a at least one bitter argument, then you are either extremely lucky or already mired in a dysfunctional relationship. So, how do you parent a child without treating them like a child? Here are some tricks that have worked for us: Explain Yourself Kids ask “Why?” so much because they genuinely want to learn. At some point, they stop asking, and it’s generally because we stop giving them real answers. When a child questions your instructions, it’s a great opportunity to teach. When you explain the reasons and context behind a rule, you’re giving the child the tools to build their own moral framework, to fill in the blanks between the rules they know and the ones they don’t. This is fundamental to learning. Offering an explanation is also a great opportunity for your own reflection. If you don’t have a good reason for a rule (“Stop making faces.”), it’s probably a crappy rule and you’re probably taking yourself too seriously. A lot of a child’s frustration stems from having no choice in anything. A lot of your frustration stems from making lots of trivial decisions every day. Ask Them Questions Play this game: See how long of a conversation you can have with your child by only asking questions. At first you’ll be surprised at how much they talk. Then you’ll be surprised at how beautifully complex their minds actually are. And then you’ll be surprised at how rewarding it is to really get to know your own kid. As for the child, they will love the fact that you care enough to ask about their day, about their feelings, about their preferences — about all the trivial little things that loom large in a child’s mind. Asking questions is the single strongest signal you can send that you’re listening, that you love them, and that you care what they think. Give Them Options A lot of a child’s frustration stems from having no choice in anything. A lot of your frustration stems from having to make lots of tiny, trivial decisions every day that drain your mental batteries. Delegate some of those decisions to your child and you can solve both problems at once. Your child gets to feel like an important, contributing member of the family because they got to pick out which beans to eat tonight. You get to make one less decision. Win-win. This, more than any other trick, nips conflict in the bud. The child owns the decision now. They have no injustice to protest. Our son eats all his vegetables because he picks out which ones to buy. Give Them Space Speaking as an American, we tend to be too controlling of our kids, denying them the right to have their own initiative and to make their own mistakes. A child has to fall a lot before they learn to walk. And they have to trip a lot before they learn to run. By giving them the space to trip and fall — to experiment and to fail — you’re helping them learn faster. By doing everything for kids, we infantilise them and lull them into a state of dependency. Now, that doesn’t mean you should just let your kid wander into traffic in order to learn the importance of looking both ways before crossing, but we parents tend to confuse inconvenience for danger. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself this: “If my child screws this up, will it cost more than $20 to fix, hurt more than a scraped knee, or take longer than an hour to clean up?” (Adjust according to your financial/emotional/time budget.) Practice Defensive Parenting Remove sources of conflict before conflict arises and both parent and child will be much happier. In our case, that meant moving valuables up high, getting rid of lots of sharp stuff, and plastering the bottom 3 feet of our walls with butcher paper. Our son gets to draw on the walls without, you know, ruining our walls. We also got duplicates of things we couldn’t replace or remove. He has his own books, his own pens, his own wallet. That way he doesn’t go around “borrowing” ours all the time. Ask For Help Kids want to help. By doing everything for them, we infantilise them and lull them into a state of dependency. It’s great, as a parent, to feel needed, but it’s also exhausting. Free yourself. Ask for help washing dishes. Ask for help cracking eggs. Ask for help moving the furniture. As they get older, ask for help with things that are just at or above their developmental level. It challenges them and it gives them a powerful sense of belonging. Remember the first time your parents let you park the car? Remember how exhilarating that felt? That’s how a 3-year-old feels when you ask them to help you sweep the floor. In the end, treating a kid like a person prevents a parent from needing “discipline” at all. Give them that gift as often as you can. You’ll be surprised how much they’ll want to help. In the end, treating a kid like a person prevents a parent from needing “discipline” at all. Punishment, deprivation, praise, criticism, distraction, and a lot of the other things people on this page have recommended don’t actually do much to teach your child good behaviour. More often than not, they teach children to be retributive, praise-seeking, or distracted. Ultimately, parenting is not about control. Kids aren’t irrational beasts out to deprive you of patience and silence. They’re little people in need of understanding and a helping hand. And when they get what they need they’re usually pretty spectacular. It takes practice and time to change your habits, but after a couple of months you’ll be amazed at how self-policing your kid is. Good luck.
Even though the primary focus of climate action so far has been shifting to renewable energy, tackling climate change will also require completely rethinking how we make and use products. A new report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an organization focused on the circular economy, found that if the world shifted to renewables, that would only account for 55% of our current emissions. The remaining 45% of emissions mostly come from making and using food, clothes, cars, buildings, and other products. To meet the climate goal of zero emissions by 2050, all of those things also need to change. “We’ve been focused almost exclusively on renewable energy and efficiency, which are obviously essential, but it’s clear that we can’t meet the objectives unless we actually tackle production and consumption as part of the equation,” says Andrew Morlet, chief executive of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The report looked at what would happen if five key industries adopted a circular approach, meaning that instead of the current system—digging up materials, using a lot of energy to make something, and then a consumer eventually sending the end product to a landfill—materials could be used in a closed loop. If the steel, plastic, aluminum, cement, and food industries adopted this approach, the report calculated that it would reduce 9.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2050, as much as eliminating all of the current emissions from transportation. Other industries, from fashion to tech, will also need to adopt the same approach. The report outlines three key principles for a circular economy. DESIGN OUT WASTE AND POLLUTION Products need to be designed differently so that they can be used longer, resold, repaired, upgraded, and upcycled into new products, says Morlet. That means, for example, choosing materials that can easily be recycled and designing the whole product so that it can be taken apart. “The fact that you can design to repair or remanufacture products significantly increases the value of those products over time and also captures the energy and the inputs that go into creating that product and putting them into people’s hands,” he says. “If we can keep that energy used longer by having the products used longer, that lowers the energy demand of the system and helps in delivering the climate targets very dramatically.” For a food company, it might mean using food waste as an ingredient in a new product. Companies also need to choose low-carbon materials. Design choices can also eliminate waste in the broader system—whether that means offering a car-sharing service to address the fact that cars spend the majority of the time parked, or finding new ways to reduce the huge amount of food that’s grown but never eaten. KEEP PRODUCTS AND MATERIALS IN USE With the right designs, companies can create new systems and services to reuse materials and not waste the energy used to create them. That might mean new ways of packaging products, such as Loop, a system that major brands are testing to bring reusable packaging to everyday products like shampoo and ice cream. For Ikea, it means moving to new models such as furniture rental so products like bookcases and tables don’t end up thrown out at the curb. If a piece of clothing is worn twice as long, it could potentially avoid 44% of the product’s emissions. When a product reaches the end of its life, the next step is to capture the materials inside. For plastic, for example, recycling 1 metric ton could reduce emissions by as much as 3 tons compared to making the same amount of material from virgin fossil fuels. REGENERATE NATURAL SYSTEMS Industrial agriculture isn’t sustainable, from the pollution caused by fertilizer use to the fact that antibiotics used in farm animals are leading to antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can harm human health. Another part of the circular economy involves rethinking agriculture in a way that regenerates natural resources. Regenerative agriculture—a set of farming practices that have the potential not only to make soil healthier but also to capture more carbon in that soil—is one important part of the approach. A circular approach also means capturing nutrients from food waste that is currently sent to landfills and bringing those nutrients back to farms. “Essentially, the circular economy of food starts to reconnect the flow of nutrients to make much better use of food as it actually moves through the system,” Morlet says. A growing number of companies, from major corporations to startups, have started to embrace the circular economy over the last five years, he says. As the connection to climate change becomes better understood, that growth will likely accelerate. Morlet argues that a circular approach is also good business. “There’s a tremendous amount of value in rethinking products and services and then capturing that extraordinary amount of waste that exists,” he says. “For the energy and climate issue, not only is it able to contribute 45% of the solution space, but it also represents a new form of economic value to companies.” ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world's largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley, and contributed to the second edition of the bestselling book "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century."
