[jemfinch]

> Hitting the kid is simply a way to translate these long-term consequences into short-term ones that can be more easily felt.

That's a good argument for consequence-based discipline in general, but it doesn't make any case for striking children instead of imposing more effective consequences.

I've made two and three year olds stand with their noses in the corner, taken four year olds' favorite blankets, made six and seven year olds write essays and copy selected sections of books, and made nine year olds rewrite homework and clean public areas in penance for their childish mistakes. There are any number of ways to bring long term consequences to bear in the short term; I haven't yet felt the need to strike these kids to accomplish the behavioral change I wish to enact.

I also won't hesitate to yell and demonstrate anger if it's appropriate to the situation. I call it "silverback parenting". We are primates, and have evolved over millions of years to signal dissatisfaction vocally and respect social order even from a young age. When I do it, I'm just acting, but the kids don't know that. Watch cartoons for kids and look how exaggerated the characters' emotions are; kid's often miss nuance, but they're well versed in recognizing and responding to basic emotions.

Spanking is just plain uncreative. We have so many options as parents I just can't conceptualize any situation where spanking was the best option. And I say this having been raised myself in a spanking household.

[blub]

Those are some brilliant examples of disciplining :)

But... what do you do if they simply don't want to sit in the corner or rewrite homework?

Where I live physical disciplining is forbidden by law, so I assume parents have to be quite adept at psychological manipulation. In the end the parent is bigger and theoretically smarter. I assume they can pick an uncooperative child up and deposit them in their room for some very boring time alone without toys, to reconsider what they did?

My impression is that if a parent didn't do their job to instill respect and trust in their kids in ages 1-4, it might be very hard for them later. The child could simply be an ass and refuse anything, including the punishment.

[konschubert]

You can pick up a child and carry it to its desk without spanking it...

[james_s_tayler]

And you do it again and again and again and again as many times as necessary until the child gets the message.

Two classic ways to fail at parenting are not setting boundaries and/or setting boundaries and not enforcing them.

Some people smack because they're lazy and uncreative. It's fast and effective because it gets the desired result for the parent. But that's not without significant unwanted consequences for the child. There is zero need to smack unless it's something extreme like immediate physical danger is present and you just need to get their attention. Even then they respond pretty well to the right voice signals.

Watch enough episodes of super nanny and it will sink in. She uses the same damn technique every. single. time. It's just consistently enforcing the boundaries. Sometimes for hours at a time if need be. This usually is on required for a few days and things change.

I'd say that so far has mapped pretty well to raising my toddler. It's not always easy but we do what we have to.

[jemfinch]

I haven't run into that level of rebellion from any of my four kids, at least not yet. I don't expect I will for some time, if ever, but what do I know about raising kids older than 9? Not much!

I agree with you, based in part on how I've seen some of my friends parenting their own substantially less compliant children, that the stereotype of a recalcitrant child not submitting to discipline has more to do with parental consistency and resolve than being endemic to child-rearing. One thing my kids have internalized from an early age is that no amount of bickering or disobedience will ever result in less discipline being applied; discipline and punishment only ever ramp up, never down. I also tend toward more severe punishments than many parents, which--at least in theory--sidesteps the risk of the kids developing a "tolerance" to some forms of discipline.

When it comes down to it, deprivation of activities is effective at length with all children. Children are born hedonists, and want to engage in pleasant and pleasurable activities. If I have a particular proactive disciplinary measure to apply (e.g., writing out chosen, relevant passages from Marcus Aurelius' "Meditiations"), it's almost always imposed as a substitute for some pleasant activity ("You'll do this during your normal screen time until you're done") and thus can continue in perpetuity should the kid choose to be recalcitrant. And since I'm typically there with the kid while they're doing the punishment (they're going to have questions about words, meanings, which passage is next, etc.) I can easily enforce the sequestration just by sitting by the door of the study :) There are definitely non-physical ways of punishing children that they simply can't "opt out" of.

As another example, one evening came home to learn from our kids' nanny that my two oldest boys were rude to their mother that morning. My wife had had a hard day at work as well, and getting home before her, I planned a quick trip to grab her a six pack of her favorite beer and order pizza from her favorite place. My boys, apart from having to write letters of apology to their mother, also didn't get to eat pizza. They had peanut butter sandwiches and water while we ate pizza. They wrote their apologies during their normal screen time and lost screen time privileges for a week, if I remember correctly. There's really nothing they could have done to choose "not to submit" to these punishments: if they tried to take pizza, I'd snatch it away, if they tried to use an electronic device, I lock it out of their reach. Disobedience wasn't really an option for them.

I find that the most effective punishments include a severe up-front penalty and a less severe but lingering over-time penalty. The severe frontloaded penalty makes it very clear how egregious the misbehavior was; the lower severity lingering penalty provides the opportunity over time to reinforce and reiterate how to behave better in the future.

[koliber]

One thing that spanking does not require while the types of consequences you talk about do is parents' time and engagement.

Proper discipline takes time! I did not realize how much of my time and effort it will take to put in place proper punishments.

It's easy to yell at or hit a kid. It takes no time at all. I don't know how effective it is.

I want my kids to understand why they are getting a punishment, and have the punishment be constructive in some way, even if it is standing in a corner and thinking about what you did, or sitting in the "time out" chair and letting their emotions cool down a bit. Afterwards, we always talk about why they got punished, what they did wrong, and how they can avoid it in the future.

Yelling is interesting. I find that emotional reactive yelling is not good. Tempered and controlled yelling like the parent poster describes is much better. Getting the tone right to the situation takes practice.

[jemfinch]

Yeah, there's a distinct difference between my yelling and my wife's yelling. Mine is calculated; hers is more emotionally responsive. That's one reason I escalate to yelling more quickly: because I want to be doing it as a rational response to a need for discipline, as opposed to an emotional response when I just can't take it anymore.

I've come up with a few catch phrases that have served me well. I'm personally somewhat noise sensitive and honestly don't like the cacophony that comes with children much. But the reality is that there's nothing wrong with kids making noise: they're just being kids. My dad's catch phrase was "children are to be seen and not heard" but I don't think that's really ideal for teaching kids to be reasonably expressive, so I've leaned on "That's enough." There's no moral judgment implied, but I've reached the end of my tolerance for that particular noise, and the kid(s) needs to stop doing it.

Kids are really quite dumb. They just don't know much about the world. They don't intuitively understand why certain rules exist, and that's ok, because they're young and don't have decades of life experience to lean on. When I ask them to do something, or ask them to stop doing something, their first response is frequently "Why?" I've been there too, kid. My parents would respond "Because I said so!" which I never really understood as a kid. As an adult I realize it's because they were trying to teach me a measure of respect for and obedience to authority, and I as an adult I also realize how important it is for kids to understand that, but I think we can do better. So my response is "Does it matter?" "Clean your room." "Why?" "Does it matter?" The kid is forced to admit that "why" doesn't really matter: they've been told to do something and they must do it. Once they admit that, I happily explain to them the reasoning behind the request. I'm simultaneously teaching them intuition about the rule and that authority matters. Best of both worlds.

I had to have a recent conversation with my 9yo boy about his response to me yelling. He gets really frazzled and basically crumbles if I yell too much or too loudly or too pointedly about something. Obviously as a parent I don't like this, in much the same way that my parents would say "This hurts me more than it hurts you" when they'd spank me. (I still don't believe them, btw, but I understand where they were coming from.) So I had to explain to him that there exist people in this world who will try to use their emotions to control him. They'll use their anger to make him do things he doesn't want to do, or make him stop doing things he ought to do. He needs to be able to respond appropriately and rationally in those situations. He needs to recognize their emotions for what they are, understand the underlying reasons for those emotions, and decide what to do in response. He needs to grow into a person who doesn't let other people's emotions decide his behavior. Yelling can signal disatisfaction, but it can also provide an opportunity for kids to learn how to deal with others' emotions effectively.