Disciplining Children: Then and Now

A friend of mine linked an article about how Time Outs are messing up kids (view the article here). The article goes on to talk about how time outs are making kids feel like they are rejected by their parents and alienates the child.

This is an interesting perspective but not too surprising considering the trends of child care these days. I mean back in the day teachers used to be allowed to strike you with a ruler or smack your behind with a paddle, and now the thought of a teacher touching a student in any way shape or form is looked at with a beady eye by the administration and parents. Beyond that, when I was growing up my parents would spank me, give me time out, put my nose in the corner, smack my hands if I grabbed something I shouldn't have, and took away "rewarding stimuli" when it was thought that I did not deserve it. And look at me now! I'm not heading to years of therapy because it was obvious my parents never loved me and I can never love someone because of it and blah blah blah...

I've always looked back at how I was raised and thought that my parents should write books on their methods. Because my parents did not stoop to bribing us kids to make us behave or continual idle threats of what would happen if we didn't behave. And they didn't abuse us to the point that CPS had to be called and they didn't NOT touch us to make sure that they didn't hurt us. Somewhere in the middle of that is the perfect amount of discipline and reward that got all three of us children to survive in the real world without any childhood issues or problems.

Personally, I think that this article and articles like this one are forgetting a key factor. See, they've made child discipline be completely black and white: Spanking is wrong, explaining to children is right, time outs are wrong, time ins are right, etc.

Here's a list of things that my parents did with their punishments to make sure we learned lessons from them:

1) We were made aware of exactly why we were being punished. There was no ambiguity of what we did wrong. We were also aware of the implications of the punishment. "Hit my sister and I will get in trouble. Don't hit my sister and I will not get in trouble". It's as basic as touching a hot stove.
2) The punishments were immediate. We weren't being punished for something we may or may not have been accused of doing a week ago.
3) The punishments were enforced. If we had to put our nose in the corner for five minutes, my mother would set the kitchen timer and stay in the room to make sure I actually kept my nose in the corner for five minutes. Punishments were never used to get us kids out of my parents' hair for a short amount of time, and they weren't set for an undetermined amount of time to where we were either forgotten about or free to run around when we thought it was long enough.
4) No idle threats. If a parent said "Emma, if you reach for that chocolate again I will smack your hand" and you reached for the chocolate, your hand got smacked. No "Emma, I'm serious, do it again and..."
5) The punishments were meaningful. My parents learned quickly that sending my sister and I to our room that we shared was not a punishment. So instead one of us went outside while the other went to her room, or something was taken away that we enjoyed like our books or our dessert, etc.
6) My parents told us that they loved us after every punishment. We learned our lesson and we were allowed to go about life freely afterwards, but we were reminded that our parents are doing these things because they love us and they want the best for us.


Now there is some controversy of enforcing punishments in the first place. Although I can speak from experience, I know that I am not the typical child of 2013 and my experiences, even if replicated, the results are not guaranteed the same. I suppose every parent has to go through a trial and error period to see what is effective and what isn't with their child. I suppose my point is that articles like this should not be so absolute. Can time outs traumatize a child? When ineffectively used, probably. But it is possible to have effective time outs. Trust me, I'm all for positive enforcement and kids learning from that too, but adolescence is when children are finding and testing boundaries, so discipline is an effective way to show those boundaries as well.