How to Be a Strict Mother

Mothers want their children to grow up to be mature, responsible, successful adults. How to best achieve this goal, however, remains a source of disagreement. Some mothers find the answer in authoritative parenting, which combines strictness with warmth, respect and responsiveness to children's needs. Incorporating an appropriate level of strictness in your parenting style takes some effort, but according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, it pays off with many positive effects on children, including increased happiness, high self-esteem and success both in school and personal relationships.

Instructions

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      Create clear, fair rules for your child to follow. Concentrate on important areas relating to safety, schooling and treating people and property respectfully. Avoid trivial and unnecessarily complicated rules. Expect your children to hang up their clean clothes -- but don't require them to organize their clothes according to color. Base rules on a child's age and maturity. A responsible teenager can have more freedom to use the computer than a pre-teen who seems oblivious to the Internet's potential dangers.

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      Enforce rules by providing consequences that follow logically from the misbehavior. If a toddler refuses to pick up his toys, he doesn't get to play with them the next day. If a teenager speeds, she may lose use of the car.

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      Choose fair consequences to punish misbehavior. If a child fails to complete his homework, the consequence might be that he can't watch television after dinner -- he is not grounded him for a month. According to parental disciplinary expert Dr. Robert E. Larzelere, the most effective discipline starts with gentle methods, such as reasoning, and gradually increases to firmer punishments, such as time-outs or even spankings, when gentle methods fail to change children's behavior.

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      Apply rules and their consequences consistently. The essence of strict parenting, according to clinical psychologist Ruth A. Peters, is not the harshness of the punishment but the consistency in providing discipline. Strict parents are fair. They establish reasonable rules, establish reasonable consequences for breaking those rules -- and then always follow through with enforcing those consequences.

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