Make your kids feel bad?

Maybe the biggest thing that stuck out for me in Chapter 6, was that you SHOULD make your kids feel bad -- for bad behavior and wrong thinking.

When children deliberately say contrary things and challenge everything their parents say, Rosemond suggests this is evidence of wrong thinking and considers it misbehavior in need of discipline. What sort of discipline? Let's say you've just commented on how bright and blue the sky seems today and your child insists it is green or even red. If the child is very young you may have him/her sit in a chair until they are willing to agree with the parental statement. If the child is old enough to write, perhaps you have them write lines: "the sky is blue" 100 times.

Another situation to correct swiftly is a child throwing a tantrum or laughing/crying inappropriately. The child should be removed from the setting, be talked to sternly, and made to apologize.

Some scary statistics:
Of 5110 waking hours per year...
1260 are spent at school
360 are spent on homework
208 are spent on after school activities
1040 are spent watching TV (that's 3 hours a day)
365 are spent on video/computer games
365 are spent on the Internet
365 are spent with friends
365 are spent with toys or doing nothing
104 are spent in youth group
That leaves 678 hours of parental influence - of which the parents are probably busy half that time - leaving only about 339 hours.

Some tough questions:
Are you willing to remove TV and computer from the child's bedroom? Are you willing to cut back on your own use of TV and computer to be more available to your child?