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Disciplining children Posted in Daily life at 8:07 am by LeisureGuy
I had the chance on my trip to think about and observe disciplining young children. The Younger Grandson, at age 3, is interesting in testing rules and seeing what happens if he breaks the rules and refuses to obey. So: what is a parent to do?
One approach, of course, is physical punishment: “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is the slogan for this approach. Of course, hitting a disobedient child can also satisfy an angry parent.
But, in the case of young children, discipline is teaching, and the lessons the child learns are not always what the parent intends. The child generally takes the parent’s behavior as the model, so a child who is physically punished tends to learn not only to obey that particular rule (and to fear the parent) but also, “If someone displeases you, hit them or otherwise take physical revenge—especially if they’re smaller than you.”
What I observed was not physical punishment, but instead methodically teaching The Younger Grandson to empathize: to feel for himself how his actions and behavior affect those around him, and in particular how his behavior affects those he loves. Good behavior makes them feel happy and pleased, and bad behavior makes them feel hurt and sad. Once he has learned empathy, he can navigate social relations on his own.
It’s not an easy lesson to learn, and the teacher must patiently repeat the lesson—both parts—until the child understands and absorbs it, internalizing it as a guide to behavior. But then the child becomes self-regulating: he looks at how his actions affect others and understands and anticipates their reactions.
Moreover, the child learns how to respond to bad behavior from others—not by hitting them, but by explaining how the behavior makes him and others feel. The child’s imitating the parent in this approach is all to the good.
The parents’ responsibility is to teach the child, and that requires knowing that the teaching goes on all the time, willy nilly, because the child is always observing and learning. The parent must make sure that what the child observes and learns are appropriate.
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