How Do You Teach Your Child to Deal with Their Feelings of Guilt?

Dr. Sears has some great discipline advice. His emphasis is on behavior shaping by helping the child learn their value and to catch them doing good, a lot of positive reinforcement. It's not downplaying the offense, but it's giving the child more ways to feel valued as well.

My son will sometimes say he's a bad boy when he gets in trouble. We tell him he isn't bad, he just made a wrong choice and now he knows better, he can try extra hard to make the right choice next time. Then. I remind him of all the good things he did that day. It helps him have the confidence that he can overcome certain things, and we encourage him to be his "best self".

He is some interesting advice on apologize and teaching that, and modeling forgiveness that maybe can help:
http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/discipline-behavior/mora...

also, I think the techniques on modeling behavior and how to help the angry child have tips that could work as well:
http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/discipline-behavior

Make sure you emphasize that it's the behavior that is "bad", not that "he" is.
I also find it useful to share my own foibles with my kids, that we are all human and make mistakes, and always will. That by making mistakes, we learn to make better decisions.

He sounds like an "internalizer" lol. I have one like that.

Tell him: Everyday is a new day.
We start over.

But always do continue to allow him to tell you his feelings.
Boys, need that.
Otherwise they get all pent up and stifled emotionally.
It is good, your son is telling you his feelings.

My son is 5 now.
When 4, he went through a spurt of that too.
But it passed.
It was a phase.

But make sure for your son... he doesn't get into that 'habit' of feeling down on himself... or start using it as a way to manipulate people out of punishing him or for his bad behavior.

Teach him other coping skills.

Check out the love and logic books.

imo, a little built of guilt is a good thing. it helps them to know that their actions affect others and that they should be behaving properly. keep up the discipline, change it as needed only and dont feel bad. he needs to know he did something wrong.

As someone who spent a lot of her childhood feeling "bad," this is a hot button issue for me. It is really harmful to feel like you are a bad person, so you need to do whatever you can to fix this.

Maybe you need to discipline him less. Maybe you need to change the words you use when you discipline him. Yes, he may just be an extremely sensitive kid, but there's a good chance you are playing into that somehow. Without knowing exactly how you discipline him, it's hard to say.

But seriously, you do not want him to grow up feeling the way I did.

p.s. - I once heard that we should give kids 9 positive statements for every 1 negative. I doubt many parents come close to that. How about that for starters?