I am not a fan of corporal punishment for children who happen to break the occasional rule. There are alternatives.
To start exploring the options let’s look at ourselves as parents. It seems to me that each of us has two corners of our brain that dictates our strategies for unruly children. One corner is tied up in everything logical. The other corner is emotional.
In the emotional corner, parents harbour some intense feelings when their children are misbehaving. They get angry, embarrassed, scared, hurt and disgusted.
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These emotions encourage some parents to resort to corporal punishment, such as spanking, when their children are acting up. And it is these emotions that lead to concerns about parents who are physically disciplining their children.
You see, the problem is that physical punishment with a child seldom works. If the kid is out of control before the spanking, he is likely to be so afterward. That is frustrating, driving even more anger into the parent, who in turn escalates the punishment and what is a spanking one day could easily become a beating the next one.
The logical corner within the parent’s brain is quite a bit more complicated than is the emotional one but it has a saving grace. It is more effective. It starts with Mom and Dad learning to work together and agreeing about what they are trying to accomplish by disciplining their child.
The goals break down into three possibilities:
- Encourage the child to live within a day governed by structures and routines.
- Teach the child how to get along better with other people (adults and children alike).
- Live through responsibilities.
For children with significant behavioural issues, parents will likely have to address all three goals, and that is fine. Just don’t start there. The pursuit of one goal at a time is preferable.
Having clarified your goal, the next task is to build a strategy to pursue it.
One option is a strategy that employs timeouts for when a child is out of control, woven through a series of rewards for him when he is compliant to the task.
The time out, most likely in his bedroom, is only while he is out of control. It ends when he settles down. The rewards are strictly given only when he is compliant. Don’t reward him because he is crying and you are feeling sorry for him. You can love him to pieces all that you want, just make sure that your rewards, over and above your love for him, are specific to his compliance.
The final step in the logical corner is assessment. Parents need to have discussions with each other and with their child about what is helping him to be less disruptive and what is not doing the trick. If something is not working, you probably should find a new and different strategy.
Finally, I would like to encourage parents to include their children in the process as much as they can. A child is more likely to be co-operative when he knows what his parents are doing and why they are doing it.
By the way, there is no magic here. What I am suggesting, in place of corporal punishment, takes time and patience and that can be frustrating too, but it is no more frustrating than the disappointment of physical punishment, and the odds are better that parents can help their children through a difficult moment in their lives.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
