Picture this: a teacher is ranting at a student in class. Suddenly, the student stirs from sullen apathy to action. She makes a firm request to the teacher to stop shouting, and asks for an apology. Getting neither from the by-now apoplectic teacher, the student announces that she is leaving to go to a "sanction room". Or this: a child is behaving badly and refuses to stop the offensive behaviour. After requesting, without success, that the child stop, apologise, or go to his room, the parent points to the list of "Parents' Rights" pinned to the wall and picks up the phone to ring Parentline.

These are just two of the ways recommended by psychologist Tony Humphreys for children and adults to defend their rights. In his brave new properly-disciplined world, children and adults live in a caring community in which everybody is aware both of rights and responsibilities - and how to safeguard them.

It is a timely book, for though most adults today have rejected the authoritarian values of the past, many of us are in a quandary when children don't behave as we want them to. Some students abuse or sexually harass teachers, seemingly with impunity, and Parentline buzzes with calls from parents who are being abused, both verbally and physically, by their own children.

Many of us don't quite know what to do in the face of what Tony Humphreys calls "under-controlled" behaviour. Instinctively, some of us are soggy liberals, others hang 'em, flog 'em hardliners. But most of us know that we can't and won't go back to old ways - and that we need new answers.

Humphreys' book, A Different Kind of Discipline, has many. It is written in the language of the modern self-help manual, which some might find off-putting. But this is no quick-fix how-to guide: you won't find sections on what to do if little Fiachra won't eat his pureed goat's cheese salad, or whether the local deep-throat disco is a suitable spot for 14-year-old Sorcha.

It is a profounder, quietly revolutionary manual that would, if we all acted on it, make the world a far better place. According to Humphreys, discipline is not a way of controlling other people's behaviour; it is a way of ensuring that nobody's rights - parents', teachers', or children's - are violated, and that if they are, they are promptly restored. It is, he says "about safeguarding the rights of people who are exposed to uncooperative, aggressive or other blocking responses on the part of others".

Equally, he emphasises the importance of addressing the problems that make some adults and children violate others' rights, and creating structures that help both perpetrators and victims.

In Humphreys' world, children's and adults' rights - broadly summarised as the rights to physical, sexual, emotional, intellectual, social and creative safety - are equal. And although many of us would give lip service to his notion that discipline is as much of an issue for adults as it is for children, we might find it hard to put into practice.

It's one thing to accept that the basis of a good discipline system is adults being in control of themselves, another to spell out for children how to deal with out-of-control parents and teachers.

He recommends, for example, that parents expressly give permission to children to talk to another adult (grandparent, uncle, aunt, teacher, neighbour etc) if they are troubled about a parent's behaviour towards them. He says that families should have "family handbooks" which list the rights, responsibilities and safeguarding structures for each member of the family - and that children be encouraged to read the handbook frequently or have it read to them. Such a handbook would probably list phone numbers for Childline (as well as Parentline).

Parents and teachers, he says, need to accept that children have the right to object to an adult's undisciplined behaviour - and that families and schools need to establish systems in which such objections can be expressed.

Humphreys addresses his book to teachers as well as to parents - and is well aware that many schools will find these notions hard to swallow. (Parents, never mind children, have very few avenues to voice problems with individual teachers.)

But equally, he is sensitive to teachers' need for support in an increasingly stressful workplace. He believes that schools should have zero tolerance for student behaviour that threatens teachers and disrupts other students - while ensuring that action taken to stop out-of-control pupils is not punitive.

In his philosophy, "punishment" has nothing to do with discipline and is more or less synonymous with retribution. People (adults or children) who infringe other people's rights should be stopped immediately. When - and only when - those rights have been restored, the perpetrator's problems should be addressed.

He is right when he says that as things stand, the issue of how to deal with the perpetrator often becomes more important than the rights of the victim. But the "perp" cannot be ignored either. It is one of Humphreys' basic principles that "ill-disciplined actions are not designed to hurt or block another, but are genuine attempts on the part of the perpetrators to get their own blocked needs met or to prevent experiences of failure, hurt and rejection". If you find yourself harrumphing at this and muttering darkly about human nature, you are probably still stuck in that time warp when discipline meant authoritarianism and rule by fear. And when "perps" were simply bad kids who needed to be beaten into submission.

Humphreys spells out his feelings about old-fashioned discipline in words of one syllable on the opening pages of his book, and he pulls no punches.

"To say that discipline problems are now more prevalent in homes, schools and communities is accurate to the extent that children are displaying more of these difficult behaviours. But they had good teachers. For decades, parents, teachers and clergy ruled children through fear and intimidation. Behaviours such as shouting, pushing, shoving, beating, hitting, criticising, threatening, ridiculing and scolding were commonplace in homes, schools and churches. "Adults who believe that these reactions to children constituted the practice of discipline are sadly misinformed. Such discipline practices were abusive and whilst they may have fostered quiet in homes and classrooms, they fostered little else of a positive nature."

That old authoritarianism isn't acceptable, and doesn't work in a society in which adults and children are better educated and "more empowered", as he says. But behaviour problems, of course, exist. And Humphreys interestingly identifies "over-controlled" behaviour - passivity, timidity, shyness, non-assertiveness and avoidance - as being as much of a problem as the kind of "undercontrolled" behaviour - shouting, hitting, tantrums and so on - about which most parents complain.

"Over-controlled responses have not been targeted by discipline systems because they do not disrupt, visibly at least, the lives of others, whereas under-controlled actions do." I suspect it might be optimistic to expect institutions like schools to tackle over-controlled behaviour like "undue anxiety over academic performance" or being too "meticulous" (two of his examples) with the same vigour as undercontrolled behaviour like "pushing and shoving other students" or "absconding from classroom". But it is encouraging to find someone so sensitive to how damaging such behaviour can be.

Apart from hurting themselves, over-controlled people are the kind of people who let others get away with bad behaviour, who can't say no to their children - or control them in a classroom. Ironically, there are far more of these than people who are under-controlled, comments Humphreys. There is much to consider in the book, which spells out in considerable detail how new discipline systems should be set up. Will they work? We'll never know until we try.

A Different Kind of Discipline by Dr Tony Humphreys is published by Newleaf (£8.99).