RE: Children and punishments
January 16, 2014 at 10:17 am
(This post was last modified: January 16, 2014 at 10:29 am by The Reality Salesman01.)
(January 15, 2014 at 9:12 pm)faithinwhat Wrote: All I know is that if I was really naughty towards my mum I got hit on the arse with a flip flop.
It doesn't do any harm in punishing your kids, it teaches them. Also my mum used to pinch under my arm if I screamed in public
Oh yeah. I make him keep his nose in contact with the wall. Had to do it last night actually...lol. My buddy is from the Dominican Republic. He said that when he was little, his dad would make him stand in the corner on his knees...on a hard floor....over grains of rice! Jesus!
(January 16, 2014 at 9:48 am)Ben Davis Wrote: My son's only just 3 so we're still in the stage when punitive instruction is most effective. 3 approaches work best with him, depending on the incident: time-out/naughty-step, confiscation of personal items and a firm, disparaging tone. I apply these in situations where he's causing harm to himself or others, not simply when I disagree with him; that part's been the most difficult but it's stopped me from punishing him for instinctive self-expression and has meant he's taught me much about myself in the process.
As he's growing, I'm adding empathic reasoning to these tools so that he understands why his behaviour is harmful, to teach him to consider how he would feel if he were facing his behaviour and to encourage him to put himself in the position of others. I also take advantage of his natural tendency to anthropomorphise to extend this education to circumstances and belongings as well as people. Part of this is getting him to apologise for wrong-doing however my main focus is on encouraging him to consider the possible consequences of his actions before/as he takes them. I'm happy to say that I use "be careful" and "think about what your doing" more commonly than "say sorry". More than that, he's started to question my behaviour in the same way.
My ultimate goal is to transition, as he grows, from coercive, punitive instruction to consentual self-administration. I consider that to be the most adult model of behavioural consideration. Alongside this, I hope to have taught him lessons which most enable this model whilst also helping him cope with a world where the majority still see nothing wrong with coercive, incarceral, corporal and capital punishment.
Marvelous! I too do that with my son. I'm amazed at how much I can learn from a 4 year old, and surprised by his ability to comprehend empathetic reasoning, and how he manages to apply to things that I, myself, tend to overlook. Kids are amazing. I wish my parents would have taken this approach with me. I was reading an article from a children's psycology magazine, and the author was explaining how much more effective it is to emulate the things you want your kids to value, rather than showing them how to do it. Obviously doing is more effective than just saying, but the examples she gave were not what I had in mind. For example, if you want your kids to appreciate and value reading, it's better for them to see you read often than to read to them. They're are so impressionable, and try so hard to be like us, but little things like that should be taken into account to. If all they see us do is watch TV and play on our phones, well...
Pretty interesting stuff. I enjoyed reading your approach, and couldn't agree more. Fostering a thinking child is much more rewarding than programming one to think like us.
