(Update, July 21, 2020: Charlotte Cushman has written a book, Effective Discipline the Montessori Way, on this subject. See my review.)

(This is the first post on this blog written by someone other than me. It is an honor for me to publish this guest post by Charlotte Cushman, author of Montessori: Why It Matters for Your Child’s Success and Happiness.  The post is the text of a talk presented by Charlotte at the Objectivist Conference of the Ayn Rand Institute during the Community Hour, July 1, 2018. A video of this talk is available here.)

Discipline is Not a Bad Word
By Charlotte Cushman

Thank you and welcome everyone.

Before I start, I thought I would tell you a little bit about myself. I attended Lewis and Clark College where I majored in elementary education. While there, I went on an overseas study program to Japan and did my independent study project on child discipline in Japan.

Immediately after graduating from Lewis and Clark, I took my Montessori training from Miss Lena Wikramaratne. I am very grateful that I was able to take it from her because she was a friend and colleague of Maria Montessori. Miss Lena and Maria Montessori worked and lived together for ten years after Montessori fled Italy during WWII.

After that I taught Montessori for over forty years and during that time I co-owned and co-operated two Montessori schools, one with my best friend and the other with my husband. My husband and I recently sold our school and are currently retired. I have written two books: Montessori: Why It Matters for Your Child’s Success and Happiness, which has a chapter on discipline that is relevant to my talk today, and a children’s book, Your Life Belongs to You.

I am really glad to be here and I want to thank the Ayn Rand Institute for giving me this opportunity to speak on the subject of discipline. I love children and this is a topic that is very important to me.

Discipline is usually thought of as punishment, but discipline is not punishment. I define it as training which corrects and strengthens behavior. Discipline can be used to teach a child the difference between right and wrong, to help him develop self-control, to persuade him to change his behavior and to keep him safe. The end goal is for the child to ultimately achieve independence so that he can reason and act on his own. A well-behaved child respects himself, respects the rights of others, respects property, obeys rules set up to enforce that respect and has manners. The purpose of my talk is to contrast my view on discipline which is based on the Montessori Method with the Positive Discipline Method and explain why Montessori’s approach is the right one. As I talk, keep in mind that my focus is on the child two to six years of age, and I am talking about the normal child, not the child with exceptions.

To begin, I will tell you about some experiences I had during my teaching career. Many years ago another Montessori teacher came to observe my classroom. At the end of the observation time I asked her if she had any questions and her response was immediate, “Your children are so … they’re so … well, they’re so … calm!” She went on to tell me that she had a group of children who misbehaved every day. They were a disruption to the entire class. They terrorized everyone by kicking, hitting and running. They abused the materials by swinging the Montessori counting chains around. She was never able to make any presentations without constant interruptions and said she really needed help in the area of discipline. I said, “Have you ever tried putting those children in a time-out chair?” “Oh no!” she stated emphatically. “Then everyone would know they were naughty.”

Some years later we had employed Montessori teachers in training who were told by their instructors not to put children in time-out. Re-direction, or diverting the child’s attention away from what he is doing in order to change the misbehavior, was to be used instead, and teachers were never to draw attention to any child who misbehaved. Words like “no” and “don’t” were to be avoided and teachers were told to either ignore misbehavior or to negotiate with the child. I witnessed classes dissolving into chaos with teachers following unruly children around the room, endlessly re-directing them, reminding them to find work.

I saw more and more parents who wanted to shield their child from anything unpleasant. Teachers continuously received phone calls from parents worried that their child had encountered something uncomfortable such as a falling out with a friend during recess or parents who expressed undue concern when their child had to sit in time-out. In the hallways when a child treated his parent with disrespect, the parent would stand timidly nearby, trying to talk their child into cooperating instead of correcting the rudeness. It’s like discipline had become a bad word.

This approach to dealing with children is often referred to as “Positive Discipline.” Positive discipline has its roots in the ideas of Rudolf Dreikurs. Most people remember Dreikurs because of his contribution of logical consequences for misbehavior. But there are two major problems with Dreikurs. First, he thought that human misbehavior is the result of feeling a lack of belonging to one’s social group, and secondly, he thought that the adult should withdraw as an authority figure. ^[1]

Jane Nelsen based her approach on Dreikurs, and in her book, Positive Discipline, she states that the “the primary goal of all human beings is to feel a sense of belonging and significance.” She goes on to say that behavior is reliant on how a child sees himself in relation to others and how he thinks others feel about him. If a child feels a sense of connection to the community, family, and school, he is less likely to misbehave. Family and classroom meetings should be used for behavior problems where all the children have an input. Rules are voted upon and when those rules are not followed, another meeting is planned. Her approach advocates re-direction for negative behavior and a child should not be made to feel bad for a wrong doing. While logical consequences can be used, adults frequently use them to punish children, so they should be used as infrequently as possible. Children should have a choice as to whether they want to go to time-outs where they should be allowed to do something fun.^[2]

Alphie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards, takes a wonderful blast at behaviorism in this book, but he thinks that during discipline situations, the adult should not be an authority. He takes the position that when a child misbehaves, instead of using consequences, the child and adult should come up with a solution together. He thinks if the child is allowed to negotiate, if he has a say, he will be more likely to cooperate.^[3]

Montessori had a completely different view. Rather than the child feeling the need to “fit in,” Montessori observed that the child felt driven to learn about objective reality and she provided an environment conducive for him to do so. Her method is unique because the child’s work was what gave him the means to develop self-discipline. Once he acquired internal control and independent understanding of the real world through his work, he would develop self-confidence and behave, but until that time the child needs help from the adult.

Becoming self-disciplined is a process that happens over a continuum. In our Montessori training class, discipline from the adult was likened to a kite.^[4] Think of the kite as the child and the string as the gentle guiding hand of the adult. When the child exhibits maturity and responsibility, you let the string to the kite out; but when the child misbehaves, you pull the string in. While the child is growing up, the adult is constantly adjusting the length of the string, pulling it in and letting it out, until the child reaches adulthood and you can completely let it go. This kite analogy definitely puts the adult in the position of authority.

This is an important principle. The adult is the authority and although in Montessori school the child is free to make choices which are important for him to do in order to develop independence, the adult still carefully observes and monitors his development. The child isn’t left completely free to do whatever he wishes whenever he wishes. Montessori viewed that as abandonment. Montessori said: “A teacher of experience never has grave disorder in her class because, before she draws aside to leave the children free, she watches and directs them for some time, preparing them in a negative sense, that is to say, by eliminating their uncontrolled movements.” ^[5] She thought that useless or dangerous acts “must be suppressed, destroyed.”^[6]

Montessori most definitely didn’t think that misbehavior should be ignored. She was an advocate of solid, strong discipline. She had definite views on how children should behave and when they did misbehave children were directly and firmly confronted and corrected. (In this context confrontive does not mean starting a fight. It means naming the wrong doing to the child.) In her book, The Montessori Method, she states:

When the teachers were weary of my observations, they began to allow the children to do whatever they pleased. I saw children with their feet on the tables, or fingers in their noses, and no intervention was made to correct them. I saw others push their companions, and I saw on the faces of these an expression of violence, and not the slightest attention on the part of the teacher. Then I had to intervene to show with what absolute rigor it is necessary to hinder, and little by little suppress, all those things which we must not do so that the child may come to discern clearly between good and evil.^[7]

When children misbehaved, Montessori advocated intervention:

If at this stage there is some child who persistently annoys the others, the most practical thing to do is interrupt him. It is true that we have said and repeated often enough, that when a child is absorbed in his work, one must refrain from interfering…nevertheless, the right technique now is just the opposite; it is to break the flow of the disturbing activity…^[8]

In addition to intervention, her schools used consequences. If a child was careless, dropped some work and made a mess, the consequence was to clean it up. When children misbehaved, time-outs were used as consequences. The children in Montessori are also given specific lessons on social graces which they practice such as how to talk to someone when you are upset with them, how to say “excuse me” and so on.

In comparing the positive discipline approach to Montessori, there are significant differences. One is indirect and tries to shield the child from his wrongdoing; the other is direct, honest and confrontive. One is democratic where the adult withdraws as an authority and the children vote on solutions; in the other the adult is authoritative, but gives children freedom within a specific framework of limits. One does not believe in using consequences and advocates re-direction instead; the other one does use consequences. One thinks the child needs social acceptance in order to behave; the other one holds the child behaves when he gains self-control through his work.

When determining whether or not a discipline method is valid, you have to examine its view of the child and his nature. This is crucial because if the child is not understood, the discipline approach will be flawed. The positive discipline approach isn’t based on the nature of the child. In other words, the premises are wrong.

Montessori was right. The primary focus should be on the development of the child’s mind for that is what gives him his sense of self and, hence, his self-confidence. The child shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not he is accepted by the group. I would add that by accepting the premise that a child should feel like he belongs to a group in order to act properly, adults are putting him in a position where he is expected to submit to peer pressure. Therefore, if the group is misbehaving, so will the child that wants to be accepted by that group. Furthermore, I have witnessed small groups of children, good buddies, who create havoc together and the leaders of those groups who act emboldened because they have followers. I have also seen children who are loners and are very well behaved. So much for the notion that children misbehave when they don’t feel like they belong to their social group.

Here are some actual reasons for misbehavior— the most basic and most important one is that the child cannot fully reason like an adult. The child is very tied to concretes. He lives in the here and now; he cannot think long range; he doesn’t understand cause and effect. I can’t tell you how many times I have told children to put on their coat because it is cold outside and they don’t make a move to do it. From the child’s perspective, he isn’t cold now so why should he put on his coat?

A child can reason within his own world. He can take two objects, count them, take two more objects, count them and come up with the conclusion that 2+2=4, but he cannot foresee that if he runs out into the street he could get hit by a car and die. He can’t project into the future, he hasn’t experienced (or may not have witnessed) trauma, he has no idea what speed means or how to stop it, he has no idea that death is permanent, and so on. The child wants his own way, and he doesn’t have enough conceptual knowledge yet to understand all the reasons why he is being told to stop doing what he wants to do. To not recognize that a child doesn’t have the same context as an adult, is to invert the hierarchy of knowledge. This is a massive mistake.

Another mistake that adults make is to assume that the child fully understands reality, but he doesn’t. He is figuring it out. The reason why the baby in the high chair watches as he repeatedly keeps throwing things down is because he wants to see what will happen. Will it go down each time? The child tests reality. He wants to know if reality will change; is it what he perceives it to be.

Since the adult is a part of reality, the child will also test the adult to see what reaction he gets. When I was about five years old I was sitting next to my father in the front seat of the car. I looked up at him and thought, “I wonder what he would do if I grabbed that steering wheel and gave it a yank.” So I reached up and gave the steering wheel a good pull and felt the car move. My father immediately and vociferously reacted, admonishing me for my dangerous action. Sometime later I thought, “I wonder if Dad will react the same way if I do it again.” So I grabbed the steering wheel and gave it another tug. My dad was very, very upset with me and his reaction confirmed for me that I had done something perilous. The child wants to know if adults and rules are consistent or if they change.

A child may be testing reality and not be misbehaving. A toddler may jump on the couch, but be unaware of the danger to himself and the potential damage to the couch. He isn’t being naughty because he has no knowledge of the danger or consequences, but he still may need discipline to get him to stop doing it.

Children know that adults know more than they do and they look to us for guidance as to what is dangerous, right, wrong and so on. Eliminating the adult as the authority would put the adult and child on equal footing. If adults and children were on equal footing, the child would have no need to be raised or educated by an adult, but children need adults, who have more knowledge, to correct them, to protect them, and to keep them safe. Therefore, limits make children feel secure. But the limits need to be set by adults, not by a democratic vote. Can children suggest new rules or request that a rule be removed or changed? Can there be a class or family meeting to discuss problems? Of course, but it is still the adult that makes the final decision regarding the rules and it is the adult who enforces those rules. It is the adult who has the long range knowledge about what children need to learn and do in order to develop a moral code and develop the qualities required for their long range survival and happiness.

When a child is misbehaving and the adult does not take charge, the child can manipulate him. Often the adult has no idea what is going on and unknowingly keeps catering to the child. If the child learns that he can get away with stalling, he will. If he doesn’t have to get dressed in the morning, he won’t. If he fakes being sick so that he can be home with Mom and it works, he’ll try it again. One time I asked a three-year-old why he misbehaved with his mother. “Because I get what I want,” he replied.”

Before taking disciplinary action, the adult must first evaluate the context. Safety and property destruction issues need to be dealt with immediately. Ignoring a destructive or unsafe act instead of saying no is ineffective. My first year working in Minnesota, I was an assistant under another teacher. There was a boy who terrorized the class. He would pick a shelf and walk on top of it. The head teacher was a good teacher and a good disciplinarian generally, but she didn’t know how to handle kids like this. She had heard about the theory that children who misbehaved should be ignored and so ignored him. Well, surprise, surprise, not only did his behavior not get any better, it got worse. He soon started walking on every shelf in the room, smirking and grinning from ear to ear.

In other cases, re-direction may be a valid intervention if the adult sees a potential problem brewing that he thinks won’t end well, such as several children starting to run in an unsafe space. “Go run outside instead.” However, if the children don’t listen and continue to run, re-direction is no longer acceptable. The action must be stopped.

Taking charge, however, does not mean that the adult intervenes in each and every circumstance. It is often best not to intervene when there is no danger or a possibility of a serious outcome and the child can learn from the natural consequences of his choices and actions. When our oldest daughter was three years old, she and I went shopping. She wanted to bring a toy into the store, but I advised her not to do it, because I was afraid it might get lost. She brought it into the store anyway and, sure enough, lost it. She went back into the store to look for it, but to no avail. I did not bail her out by purchasing her a replacement toy which would have taught her that she didn’t have to be responsible for her actions. So, she felt sad. Fast forward seven years to age ten when we went shopping with her younger sister. Her younger sister had a toy that she wanted to bring into the store. You’ll never guess what she was told by her older sibling. “Don’t do it. Don’t take it into the store. One time I did that and I lost it.”

Consequences are a very effective type of discipline because children learn first-hand. Since young children cannot think long range, they learn that their actions have results and they learn to think ahead. There are two types of consequences: natural and logical. A natural consequence happens without adult participation, whereas the logical consequence is instituted by the adult and imposed on the child. A natural consequence for running out into the street without looking would be to get hit by a car, but when the natural consequence is too dangerous, or if it doesn’t work, the adult should set up logical consequences. Interestingly, even though Dreikers thought the adult should withdraw as the authority figure, the idea of logical consequences came from him, and he thought that the logical consequence should somehow relate to what the child did. For example, if the child runs out into the street without looking for cars, a logical consequence could be to ban the child from playing in the front yard.

Logical consequences also have to relate to the individual child. A logical consequence may be to send him to his room, but if he loves going there, somewhere else should be chosen. The adult needs to find what works for each individual child. But whatever is done, the adult should always be prepared to follow through with the consequences that have been set up, because if he doesn’t follow through, the child will cease listening to him. For that reason, consistency is vital to good discipline. The adult should also be firm, but firm isn’t the same as being mean. Firm means the adult is serious and that he means what he says.

One winter night I went to a holiday event with my brother, his wife and their children. As we returned home, their two boys aged four and five were in the back seat fighting, and fighting loudly. The parents told their sons to stop, but were ignored. So my brother told them to resolve their differences and stop fighting or they would have to walk the rest of the way home. The fighting ensued. The car was stopped, the back door opened and the boys stomped out, mumbling and grumbling under their breath as they began their walk home along the road. For those who may be concerned about danger, they were safe. They were on a snowy country road with no busy traffic and my brother drove slowly so that the car stayed right beside them as they trudged about three blocks home. In addition, it was cold, but not so cold they could get frostbite. For a long time after that, car rides were very peaceful.

The logical consequence, time-outs, were used in Montessori’s original schools with success. Montessori stated:

As far as punishments are concerned, we frequently found ourselves confronted with children who disturbed others, but who would not listen to our entreaties. We immediately had them examined by a physician, but very often they turned out to be normal. We then placed a little table in a corner of the room and, there isolating the child, we made him sit in an armchair where he could be seen by his companions and gave him all the objects he desires. This isolation always succeeded in calming the child. From his position he could see all of his companions, and their way of acting was an object lesson in behavior more effective than words of his teacher could have been. Little by little he came to realize the advantages of being with the others and to desire to act as they did. In this way we imparted discipline to all the children who at first had seemed to us to be rebels … . I do not know what happened within the souls of the isolated children, but certainly their conversions were always true and lasting… ^[9]

Time-outs are under fire in the Positive Discipline camp. They view them as punitive, but they aren’t punitive. Time-outs are not done by putting a child up in front of the room with a dunce hat on so that the other children can laugh at him. And time-outs are not done in a way to make the child suffer physically. The child is simply told to sit in one place so that he can calm down and gain control of himself. By sitting in one spot, he can think about his actions while observing the proper behavior of the other children. Time-outs appeal to the child’s mind. (Think about how many times adults say to other adults to sit down and count to ten in order to calm down. This is no different. The child is learning how to do the same thing.)

Critics worry that time-outs can create social problems for the offending child as did the Montessori teacher who observed my classroom, but didn’t put disruptive children in time-out for fear that everyone would know they were naughty. I couldn’t believe this. Did she really think that none of the children knew who was being naughty? Her motive was to shelter the misbehaving children by trying to hide the fact that they were misbehaving, rather than correct their inappropriate actions and protect the well-behaved children. She was more worried about social problems than moral development and safety.

It isn’t time-outs that create social problems for the naughty child. It is the child’s own behavior coupled with the lack of discipline. When the teacher spends all her time tending to the naughty children, the well-behaved children resent it. And when something isn’t done to stop misbehavior, the entire class is disrupted and the children feel violated. They can’t work. They are afraid. But when the offenders are removed, they feel safe. The class can carry on—they are free to learn again, now that the disruption has been stopped. The focus shifts, from the misbehaving children to the well-behaved children. And one more thing. The well behaved children no longer feel threatened by the wrongdoers, so they can still be friends with them. Some people think that if a child is continuously disciplined, no one will like him, as if it were the discipline that was affecting the children’s affections for each other, rather than the child’s own behavior. But it is correction which helps children socially.

We had a six year old student at school who was choking other children—a very serious problem, so serious we thought we would have to dial 911. We called the mother into the office and told her our plan. We wanted to isolate her child. We would give him his own table for three months. He was to stay there to do his work and couldn’t get up without permission. The mother was upset because she thought he would conclude he was naughty and it would damage his self-esteem. She thought the other kids wouldn’t like him (as if they liked him now). We told her that the safety of the children was our top priority, so either he would need to be isolated or he would have to leave the school. She loved Montessori, so she consented to the plan. Toward the end of the three months when it was time to give him his freedom again, he asked his mother, “Are my three months almost over?”

“Yes,” she said.

He proceeded to get upset.

“What’s wrong?” his mom asked. “Why are you upset?”

“When I am working at my table, I don’t hurt anybody. I don’t want to leave my table.”

Telling him “no” gave him the boundaries he needed to start controlling himself. As I heard someone else say, “A child needs to hear the word ‘no’ said to him so that he can say it to himself later.”

I now want to shift gears a little bit and talk about choice making. Adults need to allow children to make choices so that they can develop independence and self-confidence, but the choices offered to children need to be safe, age-appropriate and commonsensical. A child cannot be given choices about things he knows nothing about and asking him to do so makes him feel insecure. I frequently see adults make this mistake like asking a three-year-old what school he wants to attend. Children cannot have choices about everything. They cannot be allowed to decide whether or not to take medicine, to brush their teeth, to take a bath, to run out into the street, to wear a swimming suit to school and so on.

The challenge comes in deciding what to do when a child is given choices in a disciplinary situation and the child refuses them. “You can either stop screaming or go to your room.” The child may continue to scream without going to his room, in which case the adult has to follow through with the choices that were given and escort the child to his room. Sometimes the child will reject the choices we give him and insist on one that is unacceptable. If the child continues to defy the adult, then he needs to be told that if he doesn’t choose one of the options he was given, the adult will choose one for him.

Similarly, you can only negotiate with a child over options that are negotiable. Consider this type of example which I have witnessed: A child is jumping on the couch, the parent decides it is dangerous and tells him to stop. The child stomps his foot, “I won’t.” The parent says, “Well, what would you like?” The child says, “Extra snack,” which is against house rules, but the parent agrees anyway. With this approach the child learns how to manipulate people in order to get what he wants. It’s okay to negotiate with children but only with things that are negotiable, when both alternatives are okay. Jumping on the couch is not okay nor is an extra snack. Children cannot be allowed to negotiate over danger or morality. This kind of negotiating is permissiveness dressed up. It gives the child the impression he has a choice when he does not. The message is he can keep on doing it until the adult gives him something.

Another example is an older child, around age thirteen, who refuses to clean his room so the parent negotiates with him. The child knows that the parent doesn’t like to cook, so the child suggests he fix dinner two nights a week in exchange for the parent cleaning his room.^[10] That kind of trade is not acceptable. The child needs to clean his own room. It is his mess; it is his responsibility. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t want to do it. We all have things in life that we don’t want to do, but we do it anyway. Children need to learn that too.

I think the popularity of the positive discipline approach is due to the fact that many people view discipline as punishment that will make a child feel sad and therefore squelch his self-esteem. There are two underlying premises here. One is that self-esteem comes from others, and therefore one should always present a positive view to a child about himself so that he can have high self-esteem. The second is that temporary sadness or negative emotions hurt self-esteem and that this is what causes a child to behave poorly. Both views are false.

First, as Montessori recognized, self-esteem does not come from others.^[11] The child has to earn it on his own which takes time. The idea that saying “no” will hurt a child’s self-esteem presupposes that a child already has self-esteem. A child who continues to misbehave by hitting, shoving, pushing, kicking, name-calling and disrespecting others and property, will not feel good about himself. So, we need to use discipline in order to persuade him to change his behavior.

Secondly, correction that makes a child sad will not hurt his self-esteem; feeling sad can be a constructive emotion. “Emotions are a result of value judgments that a person has made; and if a child judges that he has behaved poorly, he should feel bad about it. How else can a child learn the difference between right and wrong unless he feels uncomfortable when he does something wrong? To deny a child that is to deny him the development of a conscience; and if he doesn’t develop a conscience, there is no self-esteem to be had.”^[12]

I want to share a personal story with you that illustrates how direct intervention affected one of our children. My husband and I always used the techniques that I advocated in this talk: consequences, time-outs, encouraging and allowing acceptable choices, etc. and we were always consistent in our follow-through. But as you know, a child has free will and when one of our kids was a teenager, she started to go down the wrong path. She was rejecting us and the values we had tried to instill in her growing up. Trying to reason with her only ended in heartache explosions. Nothing was working. So we ramped up the discipline. We completely cut her off from her friends. My husband called the cell phone company and set it up so that the only people she could call or receive calls from was family. Then we took all our land line phones and locked them in our bed room. A few months later she and I went to our cabin for three weeks. We were there alone, just the two of us. One night as I was reading in bed, she knocked on my door.

“Mom, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure.”

“You know,” she began, “when you and Dad cut me off from my friends, that was the best thing you ever did. Because then I no longer had to worry about what my friends thought about me. It took all the pressure off so I could just concentrate on myself and what I thought about me.”

I was stunned. Just a few months prior she had screamed at the top of her lungs that we were the worst parents in the world and I had fretted that she was a lost cause. Now today, as an adult, she tells us we are her heroes because we didn’t let her get by with her immoral behavior.

The reason why children love strong disciplinarians is because they feel cared about. “The adult cared enough about me to help me behave.” But if the child is always presented with a positive view of himself, even when he is doing negative things, he isn’t helped: he is actually hindered. This is shielding him from reality. How can we expect him to make a correction when he doesn’t know he has done anything wrong?   He has no way of distinguishing right from wrong and has no guidelines for changing.

We shouldn’t give him the view that everything he does is wonderful, and we are lying to him if we do. It is not wonderful when he misbehaves. Part of growing up is learning how to deal with the fact that you can’t always do whatever you feel like doing. By not saying “no,” adults send a child the message that everything in life will go as he wants no matter what he does. That isn’t reality.

One can’t assume that the child completely understands when he is told why he shouldn’t do something. It takes time for the brain to mature. And from what I have read, the reasoning part of the brain is the last to fully develop. Even if a child does understand all the reasons, that doesn’t mean he has the self-control to refrain from doing what he knows he shouldn’t do.

When a child doesn’t listen and continues to misbehave, the adult has to take action. Then the child learns consequences; if I do “a” then “b” could happen.   Consistency and follow through teaches the child logic. When misbehavior is ignored, it teaches children to evade the obvious facts of reality, to pretend they don’t exist, rather than dealing with them forthrightly. By giving a child choices, before he has the knowledge and the maturity to be able to handle those choices, the child learns to operate on his emotions rather than rational thought. Positive discipline ignores the facts about the nature of the child and therefore that approach stunts his growth; the risk is insecure, out of control, disrespectful children.

Montessori had the right view of both the child’s nature and the role of the adult in guiding him towards independence. Therefore her view of discipline was correct and is still correct today. The notion of not saying no to the child is wrong, because discipline is not a bad word. It works.

^[1] Rudolf Dreikurs, Children: the Challenge, (New York: Plume, 1987); http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Rudolf_Dreikurs

^[2] Jane Nelsen, Positive Discipline, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987).

^[3] Alphie Kohn, Punished by Rewards, (New York:, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1993).

^[4] Lena Wikramaratne, “Montessori Method,” (Lecture, Palo Alto, California, 1972-1973).

^[5] Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, (New York: Dell Publishing, 1967), p. 268-269.

^[6] Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method, New York: Schocken Books, 1964), p. 88.

^[7] Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method, New York: Schocken Books, 1964), p. 92-93.

^[8] Paula Polk Lillard, Montessori: A Modern Approach, (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), p. 88.

^[9] Maria Montessori, The Discovery of the Child, (India: Kalakshetra Publications, 1966), p. 86.

^[10] Thomas Gordon, Parent Effectiveness Training, (New York: Pater H. Wyden, Inc., 1970), p. 198.

^[11] “[P]erfection and confidence must develop in the child from inner sources with which the teacher has nothing to do.” Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995), p.274.

^[12] Charlotte Cushman, Montessori: Why It Matters for Your Child’s Success and Happiness, (New York: The Paper Tiger, 2014), p. 158.