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“All that kid needs is some good discipline!”

“If you would just discipline your kids, they would behave.”

Everyone throws around the word discipline, but have you ever looked up its meaning since you first learned how to spell it in elementary school?

The word discipline comes from the same root as disciple. Discipulus in latin means pupil, and it comes from discere, which means to learn; in essence, discipline mean To Teach, not To Punish.

Okay, that’s probably enough word history for the day.

If you think about it, though, this simple thought, that Discipline means To Teach, can change the way you parent your children.

I won’t preach at you and say I have never grabbed a child, touched a child, or swatted a bottom in anger or fear. It would be a lie. I have grabbed my kids roughly in parking lots to prevent them from getting hurt, but have also hurt them accidentally in the process. We had a real biting problem at one point when one of the boys was about 2, and we did the “bite them after they bite you” in an effort to get them to understand what was going on, just as examples off the top of my head. Many people believe that small people- children- can’t comprehend concepts at certain points in time, and that the only way to handle “discipline” is to inflict physical punishment and pain on them. It’s just not true. You can quote the Bible to me and I’m happy to hear parables about “Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child”, but when you inflict physical pain and punishment on a child, you are teaching them fear, not obedience. And I’ll tell you more about that below.

Let’s Look at It From Another POV

Let’s try to look at the world from the perspective of a child, just for a moment. Imagine you are at Disney World with a two year-old. From your point of view, the characters are grown-ups in costume, there to make the cartoons and merchandise seem more concrete to small children- even more real than they already believe. It makes for cute pictures. It’s fun for you. To a two year old, Mickey Mouse is a 6 foot tall rat. It can scare the bejeezus out of them, especially when they are used to seeing him only about three inches tall on the tv screen at home. Same set of facts, but the reaction adults and kids have can be vastly different, based on their age, experience, point of view, and physical size. In fact, I urge you to spend some time on the floor, and try to view the world from where your child sees it. This in and of itself, will provide you with more insight to how your child interacts with their environment in those early stages than any book can give you.

The “Mickey Mouse is a big rat” story is a great example of how point of view and reference changes as kids age, get more experience, and develop more brain hardware. If you’ve ever read Piaget, the founder of cognitive psychology, or Vygotsky, a great Russian developmental psychologist, you know that children go through different stages where they think in concrete ways, eventually moving towards more abstract thought and ability to reason. Children learn best when we teach them to do something, let them try, and gradually remove the support or scaffolding, to let them do it on their own.

So when we want our kids to do something or to stop doing something, at any age, is it reasonable to expect them to know what we want without telling them? Of course not- you need to make your explanations clear. [and be able to justify them as well, in my opinion.] Is it reasonable to expect them to understand our adult explanations? No- they don’t have the experience or vocabulary to necessarily understand abstract concepts like “responsibility” and all that it entails, at least until they are at least twelve or older. Up until that point, you have to really teach by example. Tell them stories to show them what you mean, and illustrate it for them in way so they can understand. And this also means avoiding the hypocritical “Do as I say, not as I do” conundrum.

As the grown-up, you have to learn how to communicate with children in a meaningful way. They’re just learning the language, after all, and you hold all the power and knowledge that they need. Kids may not understand abstract concepts, but they sure do understand pain and pleasure, fear, happiness, joy, laughter, anger and other basic emotions. They have experience from birth onwards with each of these basic feelings.

Kids want to make you happy, both because they love you, but also because they are totally dependent on you for everything. If you are mad, or sad, or angry, or scared, it changes their whole world. Their physical and emotional world. If Mom is all weird and depressed, for example, it not only messes with a kid’s sense of safety and feeling okay, but it effects whether or not their basic needs for food, clothing and shelter will be met. Mom doesn’t cook, kid doesn’t eat. You hold all the cards, which is why so much of childhood is about gradually developing a sense of self-control, which adults tend to see as “power struggles”.

Now here is the information that you need to know, and trust me, this is hard for me to write: When I was about three, I spilled a bottle of nail polish on the rug. My mom was understandably angry and frustrated, and she hit me. I fell backwards and hit my shoulder on a marble coffee table top, and broke my shoulder. I am now 40 years old, and I still have bursitis and pain in that shoulder from that childhood injury. But the pain of the joint, is nothing compared to the emotional trauma of spending my childhood afraid of my mom.

My mom has a temper. She’s an ordinary woman, who grew up, raised by her grandmother, a Ukrainian immigrant, while my grandmother worked in an auto parts plant. Salt of the earth, blue collar, hard working, old fashioned people. Corporeal punishment in the family was legendary- there are stories of my great-great grandfather, a Prussian general, requiring kids to kneel in a box of cinders as punishment, to “teach them a lesson” before they immigrated.

Parents rationalize physical punishment away by saying “a swat on the fanny never hurt anyone”. Yet the “swat” I got stays with me to this day- it’s long lasting impact was not the lesson my mom intended to “teach” me through this form of “discipline”- not to play with her nail polish. The lesson I learned was fear and that it was hard to trust other people, because they were unpredictable. This lesson has been longer lasting and more painful than my mom intended, in her split second choice to hit me. She ended up “teaching me a lesson I’d never forget” but not the one she intended to impart at all.

I would not say I was an abused child, although the shoulder incident might qualify. But I remember her threats of “Knock it off, or I’m coming up there with the spoon” were certainly credible to me. I would come home from school, and I would see her car in the driveway, and dread opening up the door, not knowing which Mom would be there. The fun, happy mom, or the one who was angry for some transgression I didn’t even know about. I felt my stomach sink almost every time, trying to remember in advance of opening up the door, whether I had forgotten to do something. Always feeling like I never could get it right, or guess correctly. It felt like a crap shoot every time, and sometimes still does.

I love my mom, and we are pretty close now. But the pain inflicted on me as a child still makes me cry, as I sit here, writing these words. When she yells at my sister for something, or raises her voice when she visits, I’m that scared little kid again, and I feel just as afraid as ever. I am reluctant to leave my kids with her for an extended period of time. I know she did the best she knew how, raising us. I know she never meant to hurt me, badly enough to break my bones. But the fear and the broken trust is much more painful than the physical pain could ever be. And that pain still exists, even though I know, as an adult, it was an accident and that she would take it back if she could. I have forgiven, long ago, but I just can’t forget.

So while I am not a perfect parent, I don’t hit my kids for many reasons.

The analytical, rational reason is that I believe my job is to teach my children social norms of behavior, and let them know what “being good” means and entails, with a specific list of instructions of what’s expected. They shouldn’t have to guess what “being good” means. It’s not fair. And they don’t have the experience, or the brain hardware to run that program yet- they are still learning. And it’s my job to give them opportunities to succeed, and to fail, and to learn, in a safe environment. That way, when they have to “perform” in public, they understand what to expect, and what kind of cooperation I need- and I usually get it.

The emotional reason is that I never want my kids to be afraid of m,e like I was of my folks. I don’t want to see a look of fear or a cringe on their faces when we’re together, ever, if I can help it.

We’re big and scary to little kids. We’re loud and complicated, and speak a different language than they do. Give ‘em a break and try to see things from their perspective from time to time. And understand that you are their whole world- you have all the power and control, and with this, you have the responsibility to use it wisely.

I want to have a close relationship with my kids; I would like them to respect me. But they control how they feel, not me. I can just do my best to earn their trust and respect every day. And we respect people because they are honest and open.

I am not a push-over parent. I am strict. I am not my child’s friend, but their parent. And this means I need to be a mentor, a role model, and an example (as well as a laundress, cook, chauffeur, and all that stuff as well.) Teaching them how to behave requires active, not remote-control, parenting. It’s hard work. It’s quick and easy to hit a kid. It’s harder to explain to them why you seem to have a clean room fetish. It’s sometimes painful to go through all the rationales of why helping around the house is really teaching them how to be a grown-up in baby steps, and why it’s not me being lazy.

When you become a parent, you sign on to be your child’s most important teacher. And I want, more than anything else, to teach my children that violence never solves anything. It instills fear, but once someone is afraid, all trust, honest dialog and communication is shattered as well. You hear what you want to hear, not what you need to hear from people who are afraid of you. Just look at all the bad advice Saddam Hussein and George Bush get- when people are dependent on you for their lives and livelihood, honesty does not always seem like the best policy- you hear a whole lot of what other people think you want to hear, not the unvarnished truth.

It’s up to you how you choose to discipline your children. What kind of teacher do you want to be? How would you feel if a teacher hit your kid for getting math problems wrong in school? And ask yourself if a spanking is really all that different, and if it accomplishes your goals. Are you using your power to get your way, just as if you were a school yard bully, or are you using your power to teach and mentor your kids into adulthood?

Go ahead and rationalize it to yourself. Make yourself feel better. Tell yourself that teaching a kid that might makes right is what you want them to learn. But I won’t be very sympathetic when you end up with a rebellious child who does not respect you later on. One who doesn’t take you seriously. One who doesn’t visit as often as you would like. One who finds other places they would rather hang out than at home. One that seems afraid of everything. Take as much credit for those outcomes as you do for your strict discipline based on physical punishment now.

In the meantime, I’ll be the one lecturing my kid on the whys, and I’ll know they know the rules imposed by me and by society are not random, but are there to protect them and others. [90% of all our rules are health and safety, the other 10% are manners and room-mate issues.]

I want kids who question and understand why we choose how to behave. I want my kids to have self- control and responsibility for themselves and others. And I can only do this by demystifying the process and explaining it to them.

Your mileage may vary.

Photo courtesy of ~aphrodite, used under a Creative Commons License.

[tags]kids, spanking, violence, respect, discipline, rebellion, rules, society[/tags]