I am planning on having children in the next 10 years (not that I care about the financial burden). When I thought about this I decided to make up some advice:
“Spare the rod literally but not metaphorically.”
Basically yes, corporal punishment is too cruel, you still need to discipline the child in other ways. How can this be executed? Life lessons are my pitch.
tell them specifically what they did wrong and why they shouldn’t do it, explain how their behavior could backfire on them
“Natural consequences” is the buzzword. Make sure the consequences fit the action. You squirted most the toothpaste into the aink? You don’t get access to toothpaste, and mom/dad have to do your toothbrush.
This works with my kid because they value their autonomy very highly. Your child may value things differently.
Something to keep in mind: the goal isn’t to be a high-discipline parent, it’s to be a consistent parent. Express expectations and consequences, then hold to them. This helps children feel secure, and dramatically reduces testing behaviors (not to zero but much lower).
if they cause any damage, instead of going berserk on the child then clean it up, make the child repair the damage while explaining things. even tho force is a no, moral punishment is fair game, like temporally not permitting x activity or object due to poor behavior. and lastly going the other way around, reward good behavior without spoiling the child, to maybe create in him a sense of being productive instead of paranoia from being punished for small things.
idk, maybe I’m just projecting how i wanted to the raised because i was raised like a inmate, looked the wrong direction get the stick, instead of this turning me in to a upstanding person the only things i learned was to shut myself in, lie, cheat and wiggle my way out of situations to avoid punishment.
anyway i think you gonna do great, since you are showing concern now, instead on winging it and possibly taking revenge on what was done to you on your own child.
reward good behavior without spoiling the child
Trips outside the home are great rewards imo. Especially given I am bored of being terminally online. As for punishments maybe something across the lines of “clean the stove” or “no TV* for one week” would suffice, my response to lashouts would be “You need to learn how to behave without TV first before you can have it back”.
*I refuse to give my child an iPad for obvious reasons since they need to learn basic shit like cleaning and reach the age of 14 first.
What reasons? Look up iPad kids. My brother is one albeit with a Samsung phone instead.
The best response to “Why can’t I have iPad?” is “Because parents back in my day just give their kids iPads to keep them but didn’t teach the children to behave properly, and I want you to behave without the iPad first which is why you can’t have one until you’re 14.”
I feel like it would be better to explain why too much time on tech is bad and encourage them to spend their time doing physical things or reading rather than acting like they “don’t deserve” it.
Time outs, revoking privileges (screen time, dessert, eating out, whatever) with warnings if they persist in doing something bad.
When they do something wrong, there is a perceived reward for that action. So the goal of discipline is to have a net outcome that negates that reward. But also please keep in mind that you can’t just focus on correcting wrong behavior - you must also reward good behavior!
What discipline looks like will change dramatically throughout your child’s life.
When they are little you are looking more at modeling good and reinforcing/rewarding good behavior than punishing bad behavior. If there is an object responsible for their negative behavior, remove it (that includes putting your cell phone/device away). If your childs behavior is negatively affecting other children/people around them, put them in timeout. You’ll spend a lot of time saying phrases like “hands are not for hitting”.
As they get older discipline will need to be more taylored to the individual and what motivates them. My daughter is highly motivated by praise and melts into tears at any hint that she did something wrong. My son on the other hand is more motivated by self reward and he will continue to act out if the “consequence” is worth paying to him.
With my daughter we focus more on setting “long term” goals and rewards, and very delicately give verbal corrections for behavior. I expect things will get a lot harder with her as she enters puberty.
With my son, we establish smaller rewards for good behavior (or whatever it is we are working on) and award them often. If we “catch him being good” we will give him a reward on the spot. For little things there we try to have natural consequences. When bigger issues happen there is a “larger consequence”; this is usually variable and based on severity of the issue, but also must “sting” enough that he doesn’t judge that to be a price he is willing to pay. We try to tie it to whatever action he took, but barring that the default is usually a loss of screen time (which is what he wants to do 24/7). The consequence is usually tempered if he is honest with us (because he will lie to try to get out of it, which is hilarious at this age but will be a real problem if it continues when he gets older), and is substantially negated if he comes to us and tells us before we discover it. We usually try to sit down with him and talk through what happened so he understands why it was wrong. If it involved another person, we try to get him to engage his empathy and look at it from the other person’s perspective and how that person must have felt (which sometimes results in tears, but that tells us it clicked at some level). Depending on what he did we will also try to help him understand how those actions can affect his relationship with that person beyond just that moment.
You can probably guess which child receives more discipline. But hopefully you will also see that the approach we take is taylored to what works for each individual.
