My DH actually did Zen training for years. We have been together for many years and I feel a lot of his Zen-ness has rubbed off on me (with zero Zen or any kind of meditative training).
You've gotten lots of great responses from others. You are right, parenting a PG child is very different. But they are all still children who WANT and DON'T WANT things. It is up to the parent to figure out what those things are and use them to either reinforce or extinguish behaviors in a child. As long as you are consistent in providing the consequence - and that is key - you can get a pretty good handle on things.
In our house we don't use any physical punishment. No judgment for those who do. We choose a (very) few things that are strictly verboten (ex. physical or verbal violence against others or intentional massive destruction of property). These violations always meet our imposed consequence instantly. Then there are all the other "softer" violations. As much as possible, we use natural consequences. To use your argumentative situation example - if the child is being rude. My children know that I can't "hear" them if they are rude to me. So, if they are speaking rudely to me, I can't engage in their conversation and therefore can't discuss whatever it is that they want to discuss. The rude talking is met with my silence. This is very upsetting to my kids - now. Someday this method may not work and so I will have to change the response.
"The other day I told him he needs to try to listen better. His response: "What is listen? What do you listen with? Your eyes? Some other body part?", said with a smirk."
To help you here - "trying to listen better" - to me this is a vague request and he is punching holes in it. Try to really figure out what behavior you are looking for. Are you looking for respect? Are you looking for him to complete a task? For example, for several days recently, DS7 was not "listening" when I was asking him to turn off the computer. When I told him, "if you would like to play on the computer tomorrow, you need to turn off the computer in 5 minutes", he didn't "listen" to me. The following day, he was not allowed to play on the computer. The day after that, he was able to "listen" very well!
I can't tell you how important it is to sort out what you REALLY want from your child and then how critical it is to follow through with the consequence.
