One of the blogs I read is fairly controversial within the blogosphere. Violent Acres is a brazen, venomous writer with strong opinions on pretty much everything. Lately she’s been writing a series about training children to adapt to social cues and how to "properly" punish/reward children for their behavior.
The thing about V is that she is not only opinionated and not only about things with which she has no direct experience (how many parents out there are angered by non-parents telling them how to raise THEIR kids?), but that she is often tactless and comes off as malicious in her wordings. All that said (as a caveat, since I’m linking people over there), she makes valid points if you can get past the vitriol.
(Please don’t think that I’m being insulting here. I like to think that someone like V would actually appreciate my honest assessment as I go on to partially validate the things she says, if not the way she says them. Anyway, if I didn’t like what she had to say, I wouldn’t keep her in my blogroll.)
The biggest problem is that the world is not black and white and people (of any ilk) are not so easily generalized. I never had a problem with Spawn when I would take him out, whether to restaurants or to someone’s house, at least not when he was little. When he was older, the times I would have difficulty would be when he decided (for example, halfway through a baseball game) that he didn’t actually want to be there after all. In this particular example, V’s suggestion fails. "Remove him from the place where he is misbehaving" simply doesn’t work because that’s what he wants, and his methods are inappropriate. Further, that particular situation was not a special treat for him, but a birthday gift to someone else. Getting up and leaving would have been punishing the two adults and rewarding a petulant child (not that staying and putting up with his bullshit wasn’t also punishment for us…). Other methods were required.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of removing the problem object, when appropriate. When I couldn’t get Spawn to clean up his Legos, I told him that every time I stepped on a Lego, I was throwing it away. Not all of them, just the one I stepped on, regardless of whether or not it was cool or special or important. I think that it was less than 20 individual Legos that got thrown away before he got the message and the Legos were not only put away, but hunted down, every time he was finished. In that instance, her advice worked (except that, you know, this was YEARS before I had ever heard of Violent Acres and no one suggested this to me, it was just the only answer I could come up with. "Her advice"… semantics. Heh).
But in most situations, it didn’t. Not for me and Spawn. You see, he’s an extremely contrary person and most punishments simply don’t work on him. After the baseball game, he was grounded quite extremely for a month (but call it 2 weeks, since he’s only with me 50% of the time and I don’t impose punishments on him outside of my home… my house, my rules; dad’s house, dad’s rules). That worked, but grounding is not always an appropriate punishment and I do believe in letting the punishment fit the crime. (If you’re going to misbehave when we go out and do cool things, then you don’t get to go out and do cool things for XX period of time).
For two years, it was chores. He wouldn’t do them. He simply wouldn’t do them. It resulted in a whole lot of yelling and sniping between the two of us. Again, he doesn’t live with me full time, so I don’t expect him to do an equal share of work, but at 12, 13, 14 years old, he should be doing SOME share of the work. At all.
So what do you do in this situation? I assume that V’s suggestion would be to take away his video games, television privileges, computer, Legos, books, etc until he’s finally at the point of having nothing BUT chores to do. Thing is, this kid isn’t going to give in to that. He will draw. If I remove all paper and writing instruments from the house, he will daydream. ANYTHING but to "work", even for one job or 15 minutes or anything.
I’m not sure where the turning point came in, but eventually he got tired of the fighting and gave in to participating in the household, but it was always me having to tell him, not only what needed to be done, but HOW. This is a slick kid here, he KNEW that it was more work for me to walk him through each damned job than it would be to just do it myself, but I stood my ground, but it turned the situation to fighting about his complete dependence on having to be told. The eventual (and current) solution became "One Productive Thing Every Day", and if he hasn’t at least chosen it by the time I get home from work (though preferably completed it), then I pick and he can’t say no.
But I digress. A child like Spawn who, not only has a problem with authority in general, but also is canny enough to (attempt to) manipulate people into not punishing him because it is HARD work (making him be punished), requires creative solutions and reasonable compromise. He always has. His sense of justice is sharp and if you’re being unfair then he will not only tell you, but will give you a valid argument that supports his point. I can appreciate that and am quite fair in my discipline.
Buying into ANYONE’s concept that there are a set number of methods for effective discipline/punishment/parenting is foolish. There is always going to be a child, or a situation, that doesn’t fit the mold and requires stepping outside of whatever familiar territory you’ve staked out. Creativity in child rearing is vastly underrated and under reported. The more able you are to come up with unusual solutions to difficult problems, the more likely you are to (eventually) find one that works.
Most children have a sharp sense of justice, especially the younger they are. For as often as children cry "That’s not fair!", if you ask them to explain WHY it’s not fair, then they’ll often either give you a valid reason or accept the justice in the situation. You just better have a damn good counter-argument and be sure in your assessment of fair.
After the baseball game, when I just completely lost it (seething in a car during a three-hour drive with a friend will give you plenty of time to not only get more angry, but to word your argument fully), I ranted at Spawn for about an hour and let him know *exactly* why I was angry. When I was done, I gave him the opportunity to say ~*WHATEVER*~ he wanted to me. He could curse at me, call me names, say the nastiest thing that he could think of. I even explained that I was so angry at him, there was absolutely nothing that he could say to me to make me more angry or to cause me to worsen his punishment.
He declined.
I asked him if he felt I was being unfair and if he had an alternate punishment to propose.
He didn’t.
The reality of what he had done struck him. He saw the fairness in his punishment, the fairness of having to bear some type of responsibility for his actions and felt awful, not about losing privileges, but about having lost some of the respect that two adults he cared for had ALWAYS afforded him.
Later that night he came and told me "Mama, I know you don’t want to hear me say I’m sorry, but I just wanted you to know, I really appreciate you as a mom. I don’t know another parent who would let their kid say whatever they wanted because they couldn’t get in any more trouble. That’s cool, even if I didn’t have anything to say. I’m not trying to talk you out of my punishment because I do deserve it, and I do think it’s really fair. I won’t do it again." (This was at 9 years old!) And the punishment stuck, and he hasn’t done it again, although he has much more carefully weighed his choices and is much better about saying no to things he doesn’t think he’ll enjoy.
Regarding threats:
V makes the point that threats are useless when they are not followed through. This is mostly accurate, but I have found that the most effective threats are the ones that are, if not impossible, highly unlikely. "If you don’t stop running and screaming in the house, I will duct tape your mouth shut and string you up by your toes!" "Hurry up and get dressed for school before I flag down a wandering band of gypsies to take you off with them."
This is not the same as using scare tactics about the Scissor Man who cuts off the thumbs of children who suck them or monsters under the bed to keep kids from climbing out of bed in the middle of the night. These are silly threats and often make kids giggle, but it also spurs them into action. The time that it takes to come up with something silly gives you, as the authority figure, a chance to calm down and to lighten up, but it also lets the kids know that 1) you’re not angry - yet, but you’re starting to get there and 2) you’re thinking creatively, probably about a real punishment and nobody wants that.
Similar to the way that tickling causes us to laugh because we are instinctually threatened by a non-threatening figure, making ludicrous threats make us laugh, but we’re still instinctually aware that a real threat could follow closely if the "warning" isn’t heeded.
Also on the threats note, the NEXT most-effective threat is no threat at all. It’s that moment of resigned "…I just don’t know what will happen" when you honestly have no concept of an appropriate punishment/deterrent. That is, sometimes, even more frightening than a silly threat because you’re clearly serious about there being some kind of repercussion and you’re actively thinking of something that is not only going to be appropriate to the behavior, but also one that will actually WORK.
These two "threat levels" are almost polar opposites. The first comes when you don’t want things to escalate and works to prevent that escalation. The second comes when things have already gone Too Damn Far and the situation needs to Just End, Already. Most people spend their time in the in-between place where things are starting to get out of control and *that place* is where the threats simply do not work without the follow-through.
All in all:
The bottom line is that no form or format of punishment is going to work for everyone, or for every child. Chances are, if you have more than one kid, what works with one isn’t going to work with another. Despite some similarities, children are not dogs and cannot be "trained" to obey commands and to follow your will. Anyone looking for that formulaic solution and attempting to gain complete obedience from their children is going to wind up with kids that other people probably don’t like very much. Encouraging your child’s personality and learning to adapt, yourself, is a key that many parents (and especially non-parents) fail to consider.
Far be it for me to offer parenting advice unsolicited, though. I’m no great shakes as a mom and I’ve learned, like so many others, by trial and error. At this point, Spawn and I have found reasonable ways to co-exist as parent and child, but in such a way that we both really enjoy and appreciate each other’s company. That’s all I could possibly ask for, honestly, and all that I would reasonably wish on other parents.
~*May you raise your child to become someone who’s company you enjoy.*~
