Removing actual firm discipline for all the young boys has been a disaster.
We replaced strict and perhaps unpleasant discipline in favor of medicine, and its worse long term side effect profile.
We replaced strict and perhaps unpleasant discipline in favor of medicine, and its worse long term side effect profile.
The biggest change I've seen in the style of schooling between my elementary years and today is not the administration of corporal punishment. Yes, it was an option when I was a child, but it was rarely administered. Less than half a dozen times a year across six grades and about 1000 children, perhaps, is my rough guesstimate.
Instead, the biggest change I see is the near total removal of recess as a part of the day. When I was in elementary school, we had two 15-minute recesses, one 25-minute recess, and an additional 10-15 minute recess period after lunch. My daughter, throughout her elementary school years, was given a single 15 minute recess, and this was often taken away from the entire class as a collective punishment. To me, it's no wonder the kids can't sit still or pay attention. Children that age need to run and play without structure and with as few rules as possible. That physical energy has to go somewhere. And it too often goes to acting up and inability to pay attention in class.
The last time someone told me to stand still so they could hit me as hard as they could with a cane was when I was 7 or 8 years old. That's not education. Real educators, much like real democracy, do not rely on fear and violence to control others.
Fear is clearly not a great way of controlling your children, but no one does it in any other way. If instead of corporal punishment you discipline your child by revoking privileges, you're still using threats and fear. The alternative is to reason with your child, to present a convincing argument for why they should listen to you. But kids aren't (always) rational actors, so that doesn't always work.
Both hitting your child and grounding your child are based on fear and violence. They each have their disadvantages. Hitting your child might end up teaching them that hitting people is OK, grounding your child gives them a lot of time to build resentment and keeps them cooped up with negativity and inactivity so that they're more likely to get into trouble again. I'm not sure which I would have chosen as a kid, but now I'd choose corporal punishment.
Often people want to impose a rule on their children without properly evaluating it because its what they were taught, and has become part and parcel of their socialization.
Other times people must impose a rule on their children due to government regulation (e.g. you can't leave children under X age home without someone over Y age responsible for them). In those cases, people fail to explain their guiding logic because no one likes to say "I have to do this, the government is making me do it through threat of jail time" and thus their justification---both to themselves and their children---comes off as flimsy.
The most effective method I know to get your desired behaviour out of anyone is to withdraw attention from bad behaviour until your child is ready to reason about why they did what they did. Give extra attention for good behaviour. So much bad behaviour is down to trying to get an adult to actually pay attention, and if you punish you give attention that reinforces that their bad behaviour works.
Incidentally, this works well with adults too - the next time a co-worker does something you don't like, turn your body away from them and minimize verbal interaction; the next time they do something you like, turn your torso to face them fully, give eye contact, and interact more - the way they interact with you will generally start changing fairly quickly.
With a small child, withdrawing your attention (looking away; not talking to them) for as little as 30 seconds has an incredibly strong effect (and you really should not do it very long, and you need to set clear expectations). When we did that with my son from around 2 years old, he would almost immediately get desperate to regain attention (he'd grab my head and try to force me to look at him and ask me to please look at him and talk to him) and would usually cave within about 10 seconds. Very rarely we'd have to extend it with a second 30 second period. Most of the time just telling him that if he doesn't stop we'd do this would be enough.
My son is 6 now, and we still do this. He's getting more sophisticated about trying to regain our attention, but still yields very quickly when we're firm about it. We're very clear about telling him exactly what we will be doing, why, and what he can do to stop it. Typically we'll tell him he's free to go sit and sulk somewhere, but we won't be talking to him for the next e.g. 10 minutes unless he apologises and talk to us about what he did.
Most importantly to me is that he understands what we do and why (because we always explain each step and why we do it), and he will think over and reason about what made him agry/upset and realise that most of the time the surface thing that set him off is not the real reason, and then we work with him on fixing the underlying problem.
What are some concrete examples of disciplinary tactics we should resume using?
Indeed, kids are given much more freedom and are less "disciplined" than ever before.
At the same time, there's never been so much pressure and coerciveness than right now. You "don't have to take the meds", but you most likely will do that.
Sort of a hidden, more hurtful, authoritarianism.
Excuse me? Less disciplined, sure, but not more free. Kids today have no freedom. They are supervised by adults from when they wake up til they go to sleep. In school they are explicitly encouraged to not resolve conflicts on their own but instead to go to a teacher. The play that they engage in is not only always supervised, but also usually adult-structured. No groups of 2–5 kids going off to play by themselves and making up their own games, they have to participate in whatever nonsense the adults are forcing on them. Children aren't children in the brave new world, they're liabilities.