Are they justified? In other words is it wise/right to punish or ground someone because they have done wrong? In an adult world children get their fair bit of punishement from parents/adults in general. Is it a good or bad idea? And are there other way around it?
See From The Pen Of Miss Nettie Ashford (Aged half-past six)for how it should be, perhaps. But seriously, never was grounded or 'punished' in my life. My parents didn't believe in that. I did get one or two detentions at school.
If a child shows persistent misbehaviour, a time-out or other alternative is always preferable to corporal punishment. I received corporal punishment as a child, and it didn't correct me. Taking away my own five-year-old child's television priviliges, or rewarding him for good behaviour improves his behaviour and general demeanour. How to 'discipline' a child differs with every age group, but 'no discipline' will result in spoiled brats that think they rule the world. In rearing children you need to set boundaries. How you do that is up to the parent, but unleashing your undisciplined spoiled brats on the world should be considered a criminal offense.
Never heard of it but I shall thank you. what a lucky person you must be and the better for it I am sure.
It's a delightful story. Thanks. I think they were pretty lenient, but of course taught me (and 3 others ) right from wrong. If we messed up, we'd know about it, hopefully learned a lesson, and that was that.
My partner is like that. I am not. I converse and explain the right from wrong. I tend to prefer the communicative side of things. It is quicker long term. well being correct and logical should overul discipline. communication and pyschological is a better way for me anyway.
Up to a certain age, children don't understand 'being correct and logical'. They understand bad things happen when they do what they're told not to, whether that bad thing is sitting in a corner or not watching their favorite show or getting a spanking. Until they learn that very basic lesson, they will be hellions right up and into adulthood.
Yep. Though I believe a lot of acting out comes from inconsistent parenting (eg punishing the kid for doing something and then not the next time they do it), or waiting too long until they don't understand what they're getting punished for. :S
That is an unfair statement. children copy what adults do that is what children do, and so if a child is misbehaved is because what is around him/her is. Discipline is an adult tool created by them for them. Children's behaviour or misbehaviour is as a result of their environment. If the environment they are brought in is a safe and correct/logical then the child will follow suit. If it is a chaotic/disprganised and disrespectful then the child is just that.
Small kids don't need 'discipline', but (age-appropriate) guidance and teaching as far as I'm concerned. Bigger kids should know better.
Kids need to learn that actions have consequences, so yes, I think it is right for parents to punish their children. Parents are responsible, ultimately, for their children's discipline, and so they need to demonstrate that misbehavior has consequences. It might be enough for a parent to shout at them, or for some it might be more effective if they're grounded.
having had/raised 7 kids, my answer is 'they sure as hell are!' it's the depth of un-wiseness not to punish children's [includes all teens still living at home] unacceptable behavior... that is, short of any kind of physical punishment, which is totally unacceptable adult behavior... everything one does in life has consequences, so children need to be taught from the very beginning that doing things that are not allowed will result in punishment... a calm, firm, determined voice, however, is much more effective than shouting... when you shout you make it clear you have lost control and then the kids win... same goes for causing pain... all that does is teach your kids that it's ok for humans to hurt each other... and that's something no responsible parent should ever consider doing, despite how long it's been done throughout history... longevity of use doesn't equal rightness, it's always been wrong and never ever was justified... or even effective, in the short or long run... it instilled fear, not morality... depriving misbehaving kids of things they like or what they like to do is the most effective, which is why 'grounding' of teens is the most common 'sentence' for wrong-doing...
Exactly. Every professional caretaker of children agrees that consistency is key. Children do copy their parents, but that doesn't mean that all their behaviour is a copy of their parents. I don't you understand how insulting your statement is to parents. Toddlers, if allowed to run free without restraint, will turn into hellions that will terrorize their environment. And 'reasoning' with a five-year-old in the throes of growing hormones is delusional, unless it pertains to real simple concepts. Young children are incredibly impulsive. And if they don't learn their impulsive behaviour has consequences, you're setting yourself up for disaster. Exactly. That is the voice of reason. If you misbehave, you don't get to do what you like to do. I know a father whose teenage daughter was surly and extremely unco-operative. Until he told her that if she wouldn't behave, he'd remove the door to her bedroom. Just the mere threat to losing her privacy got her to adjust her attitude.
I love mammamaia's comments and totally agree...those of you with no kids, listen to the voice of experience. I've punished my kids, but never with physical violence.
Try telling that to my mother. She is from South Korea. There, they would give corporal punishment for doing so much as getting a math problem wrong. Students had to hold up the palms of their hands which was swatted with.. eh, I dunno. I forgot. I do not know how South Korean educational systems do things now. Likewise, I was given corporal punishment from both of my parents while I was young, but nowhere nearly to the extent of my mother's school, of course. There were a few (very few) times when I was older that my mother gave the palm swatting treatment to me to discipline where it was less to cause a "bad action caused pain - don't do it anymore" reaction (especially since it didn't hurt much at all by the time I was that age) and more as a kind of insult to my maturity, implying that I acted immaturely and so I am being treated as such. More often I was grounded. All times I was disciplined I was clearly told what I did wrong and, when I was younger, an example of what I should have done and when I was older I was told that I should know better. I turned out fine. It's one thing to give corporal punishment impulsively and mindlessly, but another to give it constructively and I have seen the results of both through observing my peers. The former almost never has good results and always leaves bad ones. Though both of my parents believe that they should have it in schools again, where it adds another element: humiliation. I do think that discussing corporal punishment may be digressing from the actual thread topic though.
No it is fine to talk about corporal punishement. I am not getting what you mean by palm swatting?!! Do you mean you have to hold out your hand to be smacked?
Not disciplining your children rarely works, trust me. Our neighbors believed in this type of raising…for a while. They had twin boys, and they are the most horrible kids I have ever come across. Now all they do is shout at each other, and the kids are impossible. Dad has to discipline them, because they were throwing rocks at our dog and destroying our flowerbeds, for reasons unknown to even them. If you can go through with it as well my dad did, I think his way of raising me and my brother was excellent. We had a point system at home. He had a whiteboard hanging in the living-room, and he added points when we did good things, like our chores, homework, got good grades, or behaved very well and did kind things to others, like sharing. Points were taken away if we behaved badly, refused to do chores, got bad grades because we had been lazy (he was very good about that, if we got bad grades even though he had seen we had worked hard, we got comfort points). We could also cash in our points. 1 point equaled about 1 dollar I guess (I’m bad at currencies…), and we could either save them up for something more expensive, or use them quickly on candy and little stuff. I have become a good and responsible person partly because of this system, but I’m also kind of really cheap… Note that if we did really bad stuff, we got punished for real. Never physical, but my brother got grounded and lost gaming and TV privileges several times.
I think its about finding a balance between being firm and consistant with your children when it comes to punishing them, but also using communication to make them understand exactly what they did wrong and the right way to go about doing such things. I think that combining those methods is probably going to be much more effective then using one or the other.
just want to say. i think punishment of some sort for bad behavior and rewards for good behavior should go hand in hand. if your considering how best to punish your kids in a safe yet effective manner, its good to remember to let them know when they did good. only time my parents ever talked to me was when they had issues they wanted to discuss, in a clam reasonable manner. always long and in-depths discussion, they treated my like an adult from as far back as i can remember. it was attention i learned to hate, and since i never got positive attention, i was conditioned to avoid any parental scrutiny. and my parents wonder why i dislike being around them. :/
That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's not so bad. But when I say palm-swatting it is purely hitting the outstretched palms of the hands. It stings at worst in that case. I agree with letting a child know that they should know when they're doing a good thing. In fact I think it is essential that this should be done in some way or form. I rarely got explicit rewards for doing things other than praise. Rather, I would often be treated as a more mature person as I did more good things, and any tangible rewards would come on Christmas and/or my birthday, based on how I acted overall throughout the past months. If nothing else I learned I can rarely expect instant gratification for things at a young age, though it hasn't stopped me from wishing for it now and then. And indeed, I've observed very little instant gratification in real life as well. Now I've seen all sorts of different attitudes from friends and other peers who have had rewards systems growing up or even things similar to my experience and you know what? The ways they've turned out are all over the place. I'm not sure I can really relate to the attention hating part except for the fact that I tend to do so as well, just probably not for the same reasons. I enjoy solitude. But that's just my personality.
jumping all over a kid every time he did something nice with praise isn't really what i meant. as somebody said earlier balance is important. in the many talk ive had with my parents i cant remember a single one that was positive. after years of it, it all started sounding the same, "we have to talk about how you messed up again and cant seem to do anything right". point is, it needs to be a complete package. my parents worried too much about getting punishment right, and forgot the part about letting me know i was a decent, important human being. the reason why i posted in this thread is that, you can have whatever method you think works best. some kids respond better to a variety of different positive/negative reinforcement. i personally didn't need severe or even mild forms of punishments, a good talking to set me straight for the most part. but even using the method many agree is "best", i was a well enough behaved kid, it ended up doing damage in the end. no issue is every one-sided, just trying to present the other side of the coin.
Jumping all over a kid every time he did something nice with praise isn't really what I meant either, and the praise isn't even the main focus of what I had written. My point was to say that a child should know when they're doing the right thing and they should know when they're doing the wrong thing. Both, I believe, are essential things for one to learn in childhood, but the best way to go about it... well, I'd say that it would be debatable as to whether or not it's debatable and I personally think it varies between children and parents.
sorry, i wasn't clear. i didn't mean to imply you said that. just that, i didnt mean to say that either in what i wrote. sorry i read your post and it made me think of the extreme of what i said, and i responded to that. not what you wrote specifically. my wording was just bad ._. of course at that point i asked myself why am i trying to talk about rewards in a thread about punishment. so i tried to explain that. only to realize it was a crap excuse. only to follow that up with a post apologizing for my fuzzy brain workings. im gona go now, enjoy!
I'm Irish. Negative reinforcement never worked for me and my siblings growing up. What worked was my mums smug look on her face as i came home with my life in tatters cause I wouldn't listen to her. Proving to your elders just what level of competency you have out of sheer spite, through trial and error, was the Irish Way my mother taught us.
When I was very young, I was spanked by my parents when I did wrong. So was my sister. But we learned quickly, and the spankings stopped when we were about five or so. The main thing was that both of my parents, through their daily actions with us, made it clear how much they loved us. They wouldn't spank without cuddling immediately afterwards, talking with us about why we were spanked. And as I say, the spankings stopped when we were very young, and we were much better behaved then. We turned out okay. I don't understand the extreme positions people take on this issue. On the one hand, you have people like mammamaia who assert that if you spank your kids, all you're doing is teaching them that it's okay to cause pain to other people (this NEVER happened to me!). Some people seem to think that if you spank your kids, they'll turn out to be serial killers. On the other hand, you have people who refuse to punish their children when they do wrong, and wind up with little hellions, and some people seem to think that THEY'LL turn out to be serial killers. Both positions are (pardon my language) bullshit. Parents who care, and who really love their kids, know how to discipline them. Academic "experts" and government "authorities" may have great theories about disciplining a theoretical model of a kid, but their theories probably don't apply to real kids in real families. Discipline techniques that work for one kid might not work for another. There are no hard and fast rules. Every parent has to figure it out for themselves and their own kids, and for better or worse, that's what we're stuck with.
