Match the discipline to the developmental age. Blended families require generous amounts of time to allow for boundaries to be established and disciplinary roles to form. Health, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status can have a significant effect on child-parent relationships. In contrast to many parenting approaches and their orientations, Peaceful Parenting presumes that each family is unique, that there is no one approach or solution that is going to be effective all the time for all the children. As a result, Peaceful Parenting focuses on parents understanding subtle differences and nuances in a variety of variables and using this knowledge to help establish the most effective and the least restrictive disciplinary program for each child.
Parents can obtain insight into their own personalities in a number of ways.
They can read a psychology book about personality types and try to analyze themselves. They can consult a psychologist and arrange to take some personality tests. Or they can look at their basic parenting style and develop insights. An example of this approach is discussed in Parenting, a book written by Samellyn Wood, Roger Bishop, and Davene Cohen. The book discusses four different patterns of parenting, rating them all equally.