What if I had an idea that no one else thought was reasonable? What if I asked all the professionals to change their minds? What if I said, “Let’s throw away what you are doing and do something easier”? Do you think people would listen?
That’s exactly what happened when I developed the concept of: Safe, Kind and Clean as a teaching and discipline philosophy. It is so much more than “discipline” that I resisted using that term for years. People hear “discipline” and they think “punishment”. I was going to be more ‘enlightened’ so I called it Behavioral Education, and I still love that description. My first book was published under the title: Safe, Kind and Clean: Behavioral Education and it got lumped in, on the internet, with laundry products. No joke.
A friend of mine, and an Early Childhood Instructor at our community colleges introduced me to several of his colleagues and said, “This is Julie Jenkins Sathe. She wrote a book on discipline.”
Ta-da! That was it. No funny looks, no questioning smiles. As I shook hands, my squeamishness over the term discipline started to dissipate. Do you know why? They knew what my book was about! Voila!
Within a few months, I had re-titled and begun the branding process of Enlightened Discipline. This title does lump me in online with some spiritual books, but I’m much happier with that than the former confusion with janitorial services.
Enlightened Discipline is simple. It’s so easy, in fact, that I can’t believe someone else didn’t think of it before me. Of course, I do believe we all are thinking along similar lines and that’s why I hear all the time from workshop participants, “That’s what I was trying to say all along.”
The biggest challenge with Enlightened Discipline is not what you do; it’s what to leave out. One must entirely stop the “passive punishment”, usually in the form of Time Outs; that have been used – and have failed for years. So read on. Learn the simplicity of Enlightened Discipline. It is simple. But like so many things in life, simple doesn’t mean easy. Why? Because it requires the adults to change.
