Should we punish children for bad behavior? How do we discipline without punishing? How can we discipline our kids but avoid making them feel bad?
I worry that the collapse of discipline, among other things, leads to a great number of young people about to enter the world with totally misaligned expectations about surviving and thriving as an adult.
I certainly didn’t endorse all forms of discipline or abuse of discipline, sorry if that wasn’t clear.
Is this not already the case? I’m not entirely sure how one might measure this, but boy does my gut tell me that its already happened.
In disputes where I'm playing referee between two of my children, I gravitate away from deciding who is right and who is wrong. Instead direct conversation around, what happened, what people need, and how we can satisfy those needs within the creative realm of reasonable possibility.
As a baseline for issues that don't have a clear needs-based line to follow, I consider the systemic issues involved and re-engineer systems to incentivize good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior. Most often this takes the form of natural consequences.
Finally, I don't have angelic children. The reason it works is because we've been doing it for years, not because my children are more compliant, or I'm some saint. We all get upset, angry, and do things we regret. What we are all invested in is having a shared desire to make things better than we found them.
What I am skeptical of, however, are responses which attempt to frame children as willfully non-compliant. That says more about the person describing the behavior than the behavior itself.
I think this may actually work better for kids. I think so often we praise/shame them, and they can get caught in a cycle of unpredictable self-worth. I dunno, for me, I like to let people know how I will most likely react to certain actions and tell them that even if I react that way, I will still love them. Punishing (with the intent to hurt them) often hurts me, so I'd rather not try to hurt them. That being said, I do want people to know if they punch me in the face, I may punch them back, leave the bar, or strongly distance myself from them physically. I just want people to be more aware of consequences rather than feel like they're a bad person for choosing their actions.
It's not clear what those questions mean.
discipline verb
disciplined; disciplining
transitive verb
1 : to punish or penalize for the sake of enforcing obedience and perfecting moral characterWhich of these are desirable?
Is it possible and efficient to instill the former using punishment?
Also, self-discipline tends to follow age. If punishing little kids helped, then why do kids often become terrors in their teens and twenties, then eventually grow up, mature, and become more responsible?
Of course some people never grow up, but many of them were smacked around as kids anyway.