Beyond Rules: What Are We Really Teaching When We Discipline?

Children are rather resilient.

They are learning and growing all the time. They fall down. They get back up. They try again. They are constantly figuring out themselves, other people, and the world around them.

As adults, we have had years to collect experiences, beliefs, fears, assumptions, and our own private logic about how the world works. Children haven’t had quite as many years to do that.

Still, think about what it feels like for a child to walk into a new school.

Where do I sit? Who will I talk to? Will I make a friend? What happens if I don’t know what to do? Will someone help me?

Most of us probably don’t have to think very hard to remember what it felt like to be new somewhere.

I certainly had my own reminder of this recently.

Back to School—Sort Of

Last month, I attended an Adlerian Psychology Summer School at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, England.

And yes, I stayed in a dorm.

It had been quite a while since I had lived anything close to a boarding-school experience!

There was order everywhere. Mealtimes were thirty minutes. The food was hot, warm, delicious, and prepared with so much care. At the end of those thirty minutes, the doors closed.

Period.

There were schedules, unfamiliar hallways, roundabouts that I was forever trying to figure out, and expectations about how things worked.

I began noticing something.

During meals, a group of young people attending a choir summer program would come in together, get their food, pile around the tables, and talk.

And talk.

And laugh.

I found myself watching them—not because something was going wrong, but because so much seemed to be going right.

Where Were the Phones?

There was a sign in the dining hall:

No phones.

Now, anyone who spends time with young people might be thinking exactly what I was thinking.

Really?

Yet I didn’t see the young people sitting around looking at their phones. They were looking at one another.

Talking. Laughing. Connecting.

Interestingly enough, I did notice a few adults looking at their phones.

That made me even more curious.

I sat with some of the parent volunteers and started asking questions.

How do you do this? How do you get all these young people to follow this rule? Do you have to constantly remind them?

Their answer surprised me.

Not really.

Phone use simply wasn’t an issue that kept coming up. The young people knew the expectation.

Astonishing.

Of course, I began thinking about Positive Discipline.

Compliance or Cooperation?

Why do children cooperate in one environment and resist in another?

Why do we sometimes have to repeat ourselves ten times, while somewhere else a group of young people simply seems to know what is expected?

Is it the rule?

Or is there something happening underneath the rule?

There is a difference between doing something because I am afraid of what will happen if I don’t and doing something because I understand that this is simply how we live together in this community.

At Stowe, there were definitely boundaries. I experienced them myself!

Yet what I observed in that dining hall didn’t feel like fear.

The young people seemed to belong.

They knew the expectations. The adults trusted them. And just as importantly, the adults were part of the environment too.

Children notice us.

They notice whether we do what we ask them to do. They notice how we speak to one another. They notice whether the rules apply only to them or whether those expectations are part of the culture we all share.

That experience made me think again about a question I have carried for years:

What are we really teaching when we discipline?

What Happens to Belonging When a Child Is Disciplined?

A 2026 study published in Social Science Research made this question even more interesting to me.

Researchers looked at elementary students who had experienced a disciplinary event shortly before completing a school-climate survey and compared them with students disciplined shortly afterward.

The students who had recently experienced discipline reported a significantly lower sense of school belonging.

What caught my attention was something else.

The researchers found little evidence that the disciplinary experience actually improved the children’s understanding of the rules.

That stopped me.

If a child walks away from discipline feeling less connected but not necessarily understanding the expectation any better, what did the discipline teach?

I don’t think the answer is to eliminate boundaries.

Quite the opposite.

Children Need Boundaries

Children need boundaries. They need predictability. They need adults willing to guide them.

Freedom does not mean doing whatever we want.

But how we hold a boundary matters.

Can I correct behavior without making the child believe there is something wrong with them?

Can we talk about what happened without humiliation?

Can we help a child understand the impact of a choice and still know, You belong here?

Can we involve children in finding solutions instead of always deciding what should happen to them?

These questions matter to me.

Positive Discipline in the schools and homes is sometimes misunderstood as being permissive or making things easy for children.

It isn’t.

We can be firm and kind at the same time.

We can have clear expectations and still protect dignity.

We can hold children accountable and remain connected to them.

“Children Do Better When They Feel Better” - Jane Nelsen

One of the ideas we often talk about in Positive Discipline is that children do better when they feel better.

That doesn’t mean children should always be happy.

None of us are.

It means that humiliation, fear, and disconnection are not particularly helpful conditions for learning.

Think about yourself.

When do you learn best?

When someone makes you feel small?

Or when you feel respected enough to reflect, make a mistake, learn something, and try again?

Children are no different.

Maybe We Need to Prepare Children Differently

As a new school year begins, we spend so much time preparing children with things.

Backpacks. Pencils. Clothes. Lunch boxes. Schedules.

Maybe there is another kind of preparation that matters just as much.

What do you do when you don’t know where to sit?

How do you ask for help?

What can you do when someone else looks lost?

How do we welcome someone who is new?

What happens when you make a mistake?

And perhaps most importantly:

Do you still know that you belong?

School culture isn’t something we write only in a handbook or place beautifully in a mission statement.

Children experience culture.

It is in the hallway.

It is in the classroom.

It is at the lunch table.

It is in what happens after someone breaks a rule.

And it is in what children see us adults doing when we think they aren’t watching.

Our work isn’t to make sure children never fall.

They will.

Perhaps our work is to build communities where children know they can fall, get back up, learn something, and still have a place at the table.

That may be one of the most important things discipline can teach. View more articles on Substack.

Reference

Kim, H. E., Liu, A. G., Davison, M., Bi, S. Z., & Penner, A. M. (2026). Elementary school discipline lowers students’ sense of belonging. Social Science Research, 135, 103296.