Why isn more time spent teaching fathers strategies to change child misbehaviour?
In the Caring Dads program, we do indeed talk with men about child misbehaviour. However, unlike many parenting programs that teach a set of strategies to use when children misbehave, we encourage program participants to think more broadly about their relationship with their children. We do this because we believe that a parent can only be effective in managing child misbehaviour in the longer term if he has developed a strong and healthy emotional connection with his child. It is this relationship that forms the foundation necessary for effective discipline. The diagram we use to represent this is the “Compliance Pyramid”. The pyramid model is a representation of the layers and factors that contribute to whether a child does or does not respond to a specific request or instruction in a way that a parent desires. The point of the pyramid analogy is that child compliance is multi-determined and that factors not immediate to the situation have a large role in determining child compliance
