Everyone agrees that families work better on teamwork than on fights and conflict. Few people actually enjoy using discipline or force on their children. Most of them wish it wasn't necessary and everyone could just be sensible and get on in civilised rational ways: talking about problems when they come up, and agreeing on good solutions that make sense, rather than refusing to help and hurting one another.

Most people realise that, in close personal relationships, conflict breeds more conflict and force breeds more force, whether it be in terms of direct rebellion, or stored-up resentment, or the crushing of one's optimism and faith in the world.

What most people don't realise, however, is that the force part of discipline is generally more or less pointless. If children learn something useful from being disciplined, it is because the discipline was there to ram home an idea that, on thinking about it, they realise they agree with anyway. If they can agree with it anyway, then force isn't necessary for convincing them; all that has happened is, an opportunity for team work and the building of close working relationships has been lost.

And if the children don't learn anything from the discipline, then you wasted your time enforcing it. In return for a short-term solution to a problem, you now have a small person who doesn't agree with your ideas and who either doesn't understand where they are going wrong, or knows they must put up with you using force on them whenever you are the one who gets it wrong in the future. Which is exactly the opposite of the good trusting relationship you want. 

At "Rational Parenting", we are looking for increasingly better ways of solving problems. Problems don't have to be painful or annoying conflicts: they can be challenges, or interesting puzzles, or thought-provoking choices. Only when a problem becomes an arena where people are no longer communicating together in shared pursuit of better ways forward, does it turn into a fight. A fight is a conflict where people are working against each other instead of working together. Rational parents seek to create the kinds of relationships where such a thing might never need to happen again. 

We want to replace the fighting and conflicts that constitute forceful means of dealing with life with children with sustainable, positive, friendly, respectful, always-developing relationships, where people care about each other's happiness and actively seek to further their lives and challenges together.

We're not saying it's easy; but we do think it is possible. We also think it gets easier the more and the better you achieve it.