Beyond Discipline: Train your child’s character
Beyond Discipline: Train Your Child's Character addresses the question every parent eventually asks: what happens when you aren't looking? True character training goes far deeper than managing external behavior — it shapes the inner life of a child so that they want to do right, even when no one is watching.
Drawing on over 30 years of veteran teaching experience with hundreds of students, Renee Ellison shares immediately practical, effective strategies to help you "run ahead" of your child's disturbing behaviors — and shore up the "afterwards" of difficult moments to far better advantage than you ever thought possible. Instead of doing figure-8s with the same behaviors, your children will make genuine progress in understanding why they themselves want to improve.
Listen to Renee describe a sampling of the child training tips she shares.
What You'll Find Inside
- Numerous immediately practical strategies for training character — not just curbing behavior
- Teacher-proven, time-tested techniques that produce exceptional results
- How to make your children surer of their own behavior, even when you aren't watching
- Strategies that bring peace to your children — and to your whole family
- Bonus section: Discipline strategies for managing groups of children — originally developed for unruly after-school programs. These do the job!
Formats Available
Available as a 106-page paperback (includes a Q&A section on further character training tips), a 72-page PDF e-Book, and a 2026-updated Kindle version. All formats start at just $1.99.
Watch Renee on Child Training & Discipline
Hear Renee share practical child training insights from her decades of teaching and parenting experience.
- Discipline with Dignity — practical strategies for training character, not just managing behavior
- Can't Stand Your Children? — honest, compassionate help for overwhelmed parents
- Child Training: 3 Obedience Tips — three immediately actionable steps toward lasting obedience
Further Reading: Child Training & Discipline on Our Blog
Discipline Strategies
- The distinction between child discipline and child training
- Child training vs. child discipline
- Verses about disciplining your child
- Parenting with intention
- Two basics of successful parenting
- The three keys to outstanding parenting (part 1)
- The three keys to outstanding parenting (part 2)
- The three keys to outstanding parenting (part 3)
- The With-You Principle — one of the best teaching strategies for homeschoolers
- Different strategies for different hours
- When should I say yes and when should I say no in child training?
- Delegation or dumping? A mother's proper role
- How to respond when someone poses a third-choice escape from a two-choice option
- 'Tis NEVER too late to parent BETTER
- Pay more attention to your children
- Gentle mothering
- Parenting and spousal relationships tips
- We train children, not adults
- Don't train an escape artist
- Train your children to always take the high ground
- Retraining the parents and their child who was rewarded for throwing a fit
- How to shape and train ANY skill or domestic duty or talent in a child
- Children love structure and routine
- Two tips for successfully managing groups of children
- Characteristics that are fashioned and practiced in a godly home
Specific Challenges
- Disciplining a lying child
- Dawdling
- Rules, boundaries and limitations: The solution for a child who is habitually pitching a fit
- When children report an altercation and you don't know who did what
- Parenting sibling rivalry
- Teaching children how to handle their anger
- Keeping a child academically motivated and on task
- Never, ever, be angry with your child over academics
- Setting up a vigorous homeschool day
- The socialization dilemma
- Teaching our children how to wisely relate to peers
- The importance of rescuing a straying child
- What to do about an unmotivated but very creative only child
- You can help your child change a defeating habit
- Is your child living in unreality?
- A beginning homeschooler's questions/frustrations and a veteran homeschooler's seasoned, calming answers
- Listen to Renee's advice on how to teach a resistant student
Media Influences
- A quiet lethal sabotage of children that people in the Bible never faced
- Keeping a lid on the media monster
- Turn off the movies!
- Movies: A passport to delusion
- Junk fantasy is killing children's grip on reality
- Corralling the influence of worldly media in the home
Ages & Stages
- Early potty training
- How to wash your toddler's hair without tears
- Young children's needs
- Two strategies for shaping the heart of a young child
- Observations of superb parenting of little tykes
- Mothering tip: Always plan a little companion project
- Training children in thankfulness
- Training a young adult in cheerfulness
- Teach your growing children about hidden beauty
- Boys and puberty
- Raising self-controlled young men and women
- 5 reasons why God insists upon no pre-marital sex for those who walk uprightly but plan to marry later
- Adolescent freedoms?
- Attitude problems in a teenager
- Challenge your teen, and pull away from trivia
- Teach your older child that a human being makes a poor god
- Raise a holy child (part 1 of 2)
- Raise a holy child, not just an academic one (part 2 of 2)
- Grandparenting
- Grandparents: Love your grandchildren without usurping their primary love relationships
Related Products You May Also Enjoy
- Dynamite Discipline Strategies for Managing Any Group of Children
- Child Training Tips Bundle
- Teachers' Secrets and Motherhood Savvy for Homeschoolers (book)
- Homeschooling a Resistant Child
- Training Children Further
- Training Terrific Tots
- Homeschooling a Gifted Child
- Raising an Only Child for the Glory of God
- Motherhood Tips
- Character Traits Coloring Book and Songs
- A Godly Way to Share the Birds and the Bees
- Goofy Little Rewards for Children
- Savvy Teens (book)
- Keep Your Children from Materialism
- Media Watching out of Control
