[adrusi]

I definitely understand why using fear to control children is a bad thing, but as for violence, it's at the root of all power anyway. Whenever you impose a disciplinary sanction, it's implicit that if the sanction is not respected, it will be replaced by an alternative, at least as harsh sanction, and eventually the alternative sanction will be violent.

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.

[true_religion]

While it's often pointed out that children are not rational actors, I'd also like to include that parents are not rational actors all the time either.

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.

[vidarh]

> 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.

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.