How do you discipline children without spanking or even yelling at them? The trick is to take a broad-based approach that incorporates several techniques. One of the problems to finding the right techniques has been that low quality research studies have led to suggestions which don’t work, or even backfire. Karen Quail, a teacher, school counselor, and researcher in South Africa dug into the problem and after figuring it out over a 5-year study, she developed a list of easy to implement techniques, and has made them available on her Peace Discipline website.

One example of a misunderstanding of parenting techniques is time-out and time-in. Highly respected researcher Dan Siegel promoted the idea of time-in (not isolating children because that can be a harsh rejection). Many people immediately assumed he meant that time-out was a bad idea. However, research shows that both methods are effective, if used in the right way, and at the right times.

South Africa has had a long history of harsh parenting, and Karen Quail was working on helping her country learn to take a new approach. As she was teaching, parents kept asking her, “Well, what do I do if I can’t hit them or yell at them?” She had some instinctual ideas, but she wanted to know what research recommended so she could give good advice. After she looked at lots of research studies and their recommendations, she realized that many of them contradicted each other, and often recommended techniques which seemed instinctively wrong to her. When she looked further, she realized many of the studies were not done properly and didn’t qualify as reliable science.

Massive research study on effective parenting discipline techniques

So to address the problem of poor science, she set out to do some good research science. She started by reading the abstracts (research summary) of over 35,000 research studies. (Yeah, that’s a lot.) From there, she tossed out studies that used ineffective research methods, and focused on meta-studies, which are research studies which look at many other studies. She eventually selected over 200 meta-studies to examine, and she compared all their findings, and organized what she was seeing. This took her five years! The result of her work is amazing. She was able to sort out a fairly small list of what she calls nonviolent parenting techniques which are all solidly supported by research. She calls the list a Peace Discipline Toolkit.

When she was done, she started to work on a book. But then she realized the purpose of her life’s work is to help parents, so she decided to make her Toolkit available for free on the internet. In addition, she offers free and quick YouTube videos. For parents who want a little more guidance, she offers online parenting classes at a very reasonable price. While South Africa is in a different Time zone, she offers them in the warm South African evenings so people in the U.S. can join them in the morning on the west coast and middle America, and around the lunch hour on the east coast.

Resources

You can find a summary of her research in the Child Discipline article on Wikipedia.

You can find her Toolkit on Peace Discipline.

Karen has a YouTube channel with a series of brief and pointed talks about how to implement Peace Discipline.

You can read her research study (advanced level reading), and a summary of her findings on each nonviolent discipline tool, which is freely available at Research (peacediscipline.com).

Peace Discipline techniques are consistent with the SNACCMS activities concept for helping children develop optimal neural growth, and with attachment informed parenting techniques.

ClallamCountyBar.com highly recommends Peace Discipline to all parents.

Karen Quail

Karen lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and has a background as a school counsellor and teacher. She now works independently, coaching and running workshops on non-violent discipline and related topics. 

Karen’s research on non-violent discipline skills was a part of her psychology masters at the University of Cape Town.

Quail, K. R., & Ward, C. L. (2020). Nonviolent Discipline Options for Caregivers and Teachers: A Systematic Overview of the Evidence. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, Copyright © 2020. DOI: 10.1177/1524838020967340. It is available (at a cost) at sagepub.com/journals, and Karen has made it available at no cost at https://www.peacediscipline.com/research.html.