Let me guess, the shouting and banging all ocurred during his teenage years? :o) I think the entire teenage years are meant to slowly start parents in the separation process so they don't have too much anxiety when their child goes off to college. :o)





>>And what do you do when grounding, taking away toys, time-outs, etc don't work? What's your backup plan? More talking? When your 'negative consequences' don't make a dent in the behaviour?
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>>I'm beginning to think that you were blessed with children that the above worked on.
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>I have one kid where there were times where we had to stand outside his room and hold the door shut to keep him in there. There was plenty of yelling and screaming and slammed doors. But I never hit him. (My husband did, once, that I can remember, and regretted it immediately.)
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>My second child was much more easy-going, and I can't actually remember ever even sending him to his room.
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>>Not everyone is. My parents had one such child. And then they had me (grin). I can assure you that I earned every "whuppin'" I got, and I was the kind of child who would sit and weigh the relative merits of the action - kinda along the lines of "Is this gonna be worth the punishment I'm gonna get and how long can I keep Mom from finding out". I can remember pondering such at about the age of 4 because we knew what the consequences of our actions was going to be before we did whatever the 2nd time. The first was a freebie. That's when you got sat down and told why you were never to do that again and THIS (insert various punishments here) was what would happen the next time we did it. Now, was paddling at the top of the list of punishment? No. That was reserved for really big stupidity on our part, but we always knew that the possibility was there.
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>But the possibility being there undermines other disciplinary action. You know what the limit is, and you'll push up to that limit.
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>I also wonder whether your parents really followed through on the other stuff. I learned early to keep the threats in line with the behavior I was trying to manage and not to make big threats for small misbehaviors. That way, when I used them for larger issues, they were more likely to be effective.
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>Tamar