[mountainash]

When we became parents, I was of a punitive mindset while my husband was a of a GD mindset. He asked that we parent gently and, in the name of WOS (another mindset I held at the time), I obeyed him. I was quite sure my husband would change his tune right around the time our son turned two. It's laughable to me now to think about that. I really thought I had God on my side.

So Benji was about 18 months, maybe a little younger before I really began to feel like I needed to talk my husband outta this gentle discipline thing sooner rather than later. At that time, Benji had a thing for getting to the computer cables. I'd pick him up, move him away, tell him no-touch aaaand five seconds later he'd be at it again. It was maddening.

One day I literally counted how many times I repeated this scenario with our son and when my husband came home from work, I confronted him with the outrageous number. I told him that talking to and scolding our son just wasn't working. He was too young to understand. I concluded that it was necessary to spank if I ever wanted my boundaries to be respected.

I'll never forget what happened next. We got in the car and went to the home building store--not to buy a yardstick but to find a simple cabinet for the computers. When we got home, Jason put the computers in the cabinet and secured the cords that ran from the backs of the computer towers to the monitors and keyboards out of sight behind the desk. Next he took a short ethernet cable that was brightly colored and let our son play with it. The short cable satisfied my son's curiosity and gave me something to redirect him to but he no longer messed with the computer cables anyway because he couldn't! They were out of his reach and stayed that way until he had the maturity to be around them safely.

My husband showed me how to enforce my boundaries with my children without using violence. It was a huge paradigm shift.