When they do something wrong, there is a perceived reward for that action. So the goal of discipline is to have a net outcome that negates that reward. But also please keep in mind that you can’t just focus on correcting wrong behavior - you must also reward good behavior!

What discipline looks like will change dramatically throughout your child’s life.

When they are little you are looking more at modeling good and reinforcing/rewarding good behavior than punishing bad behavior. If there is an object responsible for their negative behavior, remove it (that includes putting your cell phone/device away). If your childs behavior is negatively affecting other children/people around them, put them in timeout. You’ll spend a lot of time saying phrases like “hands are not for hitting”.

As they get older discipline will need to be more taylored to the individual and what motivates them. My daughter is highly motivated by praise and melts into tears at any hint that she did something wrong. My son on the other hand is more motivated by self reward and he will continue to act out if the “consequence” is worth paying to him.

With my daughter we focus more on setting “long term” goals and rewards, and very delicately give verbal corrections for behavior. I expect things will get a lot harder with her as she enters puberty.

With my son, we establish smaller rewards for good behavior (or whatever it is we are working on) and award them often. If we “catch him being good” we will give him a reward on the spot. For little things there we try to have natural consequences. When bigger issues happen there is a “larger consequence”; this is usually variable and based on severity of the issue, but also must “sting” enough that he doesn’t judge that to be a price he is willing to pay. We try to tie it to whatever action he took, but barring that the default is usually a loss of screen time (which is what he wants to do 24/7). The consequence is usually tempered if he is honest with us (because he will lie to try to get out of it, which is hilarious at this age but will be a real problem if it continues when he gets older), and is substantially negated if he comes to us and tells us before we discover it. We usually try to sit down with him and talk through what happened so he understands why it was wrong. If it involved another person, we try to get him to engage his empathy and look at it from the other person’s perspective and how that person must have felt (which sometimes results in tears, but that tells us it clicked at some level). Depending on what he did we will also try to help him understand how those actions can affect his relationship with that person beyond just that moment.

You can probably guess which child receives more discipline. But hopefully you will also see that the approach we take is taylored to what works for each individual.