Raising good humans
And how punishment thwarts that goal
When we think about the main goals of raising children, I would argue that there are only three categories of things that parents would like to teach:
1. Acceptable behaviour
2. Morals/values
3. Emotional regulation
We want to raise good humans who can make good decisions and control their emotions. That’s the ultimate goal.
But our children don’t know about the goal, and sometimes it feels like they’ve got their own agenda: to act as little tyrants who only want to make their siblings and parents miserable. They might be acting out, misbehaving, throwing tantrums, lying, fighting each other, making messes, teasing each other, or whining. And when that happens on repeat, we sometimes fall into a place of fear.
“I can’t believe my daughter stole that toy from kindergarten! She’s 4 and a thief already!”
“Their room is a mess again! They’ll never learn the value of tidying up at this rate!”
“I’m so worried! My son always throws things when he’s angry. What if he never learns to control his temper?”
The issue with parenting from fear is that it’s reactive. We react unconsciously, drawing on the scripts and patterns that were used on us. We might say things like:
“Keep this up, young lady, and there will be consequences!”
“Go to your room, right now! And don’t come out until you’ve thought about what you’ve done!”
“Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!”
If you’re a parent now, there’s a very good chance that these things were said to you. Many of us were raised with behaviourist principles – the idea that behaviour can be shaped by offering rewards or inflicting punishments. Books like 1-2-3 Magic and TV shows like SuperNanny emphasised the importance of consequences (which, in this case, was actually just a nice way of saying punishment). And due to generational cycles, many of our parents weren’t comfortable dealing with negative emotions. Unless we’re being conscious about our disciplinary techniques, it’s easy to default to threats, punishments, and pushing down negative emotions when our children are misbehaving.
We don’t want our children to “get away with it”. They “need to learn their lesson”.
Yet the truth is, punishments aren’t the right tool to teach acceptable behaviour, morals, or emotional regulation.
Punishment is good for one thing – securing immediate compliance. But at a high cost.
Constance Kamii argued that punishment leads to three possible outcomes in the long term.
“The most common one is calculation of risks. The child who is punished will repeat the same act but try to avoid being caught the next time… The second possible outcome of punishment is the opposite of the first one, blind conformity. Some compliant children become perfect conformists because conformity assures them of security and respectability. When they become complete conformists, children do not have to make decisions anymore, as all they have to do is obey. The third possible outcome is revolt. Some children are angels for years but decide at a certain point that they are tired of pleasing their parents and teachers all the time, and that the time has come for them to begin living for themselves. They may, thus, even begin to engage in various acts of delinquency.”
I believe that each of these potential consequences violates one of the goals that we’re trying to achieve in raising our children.
1. Calculation of risks
Many times, punishment is used to deter a child from behaving in the same way again. We take away screen privileges, make them miss out on dessert, or cancel fun outings with the goal of discouraging them from repeating the behaviour. We hope to shape their behaviour into something that is more acceptable.
However, inflicting a punishment doesn’t typically meet that goal. It just changes the timing of the behaviour. Instead of learning ways to change their conduct, they learn to avoid getting caught. The toy is still stolen, but is now hidden immediately. The brother is still hit, but only after the parent leaves the room. Punishment doesn’t teach that certain behaviours result in negative consequences, it teaches that getting caught results in negative consequences. Consequently, there is no motivation to change their behaviour beyond reducing the likelihood of getting caught.
2. Blind conformity
On the surface, blind conformity can seem like punishment has done its job. Society holds up the ideal of the ‘good child’ as one who is compliant and obedient. So when, following a punishment, our children obey our commands immediately and without complaining, it can seem that our children did ‘learn their lesson’. Punishment shaped them into moral individuals who obey their parents.
Yet, while none of us want to raise children who are constantly disobeying us and rebelling against all of our requests, neither should we want to raise children who are perfectly compliant and obedient. As Kamii notes in the same article, “Children learn to make wise decisions not by being obedient, but by making choices and decisions for themselves.” Our children don’t develop morals or values when they make good choices because they are obeying others. They develop morals and values when they make good choices because they have learnt, through their own experiences, what good choices are.
3. Revolt
We don’t need to look far or wide throughout history to see how a continued regime of punishment and control leads to revolt. While the causes of societal revolt are multi-faceted and complex, I can confidently say that revolt doesn’t happen when people are feeling happy and emotionally regulated. They’re much more likely to be feeling a sense of injustice, frustration, and anger.
When our children are repeatedly punished, they may comply for a while, pushing their frustration, disappointment, or anger down to please their parents and teachers. Yet we can only push down so much unprocessed emotions before they eventually spill out. Then we see the emergence of the rebellious teenager, the pre-teen who disdainfully ignores their parent, the child who intentionally acts out.
Punishment doesn’t give our children the opportunity to learn emotional regulation. It teaches emotional suppression. Then when they can no longer suppress their emotions, everything comes spilling out in destructive ways.
What is the alternative?
Clearly, punishment isn’t the disciplinary tool we should be wielding to meet our goal of raising well-behaved, moral, emotionally regulated children. So what should we be doing instead?
1. Fostering acceptable behaviour
Children are going to make mistakes and engage in misbehaviour. Expecting them not to is akin to holding them up to a higher standard than we expect of ourselves. Both to proactively prevent misbehaviour and to respond to it when it arises, we can engage in collaborative problem solving.
Proactively, we can explain the expectations we have for their behaviour in a given situation, and together brainstorm what rules and consequences are suitable. We can then enable them to meet these expectations by setting the environment up for their success.
In responding to misbehaviour, we begin by exploring the cause of the misbehaviour, trying to take their perspective and understand what led to their actions. We explain why their behaviour wasn’t acceptable by expounding on the impact it had on us or others. We then problem solve together, determining what reparations are necessary and supporting them to make those reparations.
Punishment fails to teach acceptable behaviour as it encourages children to think about the impact the punishment had on them rather than the impact their behaviour had on others. Collaborative problem solving encourages them to take another’s perspective and choose better behaviour to respect everyone’s needs and preferences.
2. Allowing moral development
As explained earlier, children don’t learn morals by blindly obeying others. If we want to teach morals and values, we need to move away from punishing them into compliance, and instead move towards supporting their autonomy… even when they make poor decisions.
Here’s what autonomy support doesn’t mean: allowing them to make a poor decision and then rescuing them from the consequences, providing excessive pressure to encourage them to make the ‘right’ decision, or giving them complete control over every decision that needs to be made in their life.
Here’s what healthy autonomy support does mean: allowing them to make poor decisions (when the consequences aren’t unbearably high) and then letting them experience the natural consequences of their actions, providing gentle scaffolding as they engage in decision making without shaming them for making decisions that you disagree with, and giving them control over smaller decisions when they’re young and increasing their degree of autonomy as they prove themselves capable.
As they repeatedly experience the consequences of various decisions, they will determine for themselves which personal values matter to them. They will learn wisdom as they experience the consequences of decisions that are wise and those which are unwise. They will learn to value kindness by contrasting how it feels to be kind and unkind. They will learn honesty as they see how they lose trust through dishonesty.
3. Building emotional regulation
Banishing children to a time-out, ignoring them during a tantrum, or punishing them for big emotions does nothing to teach them emotional regulation. As Dr Tina Payne Bryson and Dr Daniel Siegel explain in their book The Whole Brain Child, a tantrum is the result of the amygdala (the brain’s threat detector) blocking the staircase between the upstairs brain (the rational, logical part of the brain) and the downstairs brain (the emotional, reactive part of the brain). When this happens, the child is literally unable to calm down and reason logically.
We teach emotional regulation by helping to unblock the staircase. We do this through co-regulation – keeping our own amygdala calm as we support our child to regain control of theirs. Different approaches work best for different children, but in general techniques such as offering physical comfort, using soothing tones, validating their emotions, and using breathing exercises can be helpful.
We also model emotional regulation as we demonstrate how we calm down when our own amygdala is activated. Avoid doing or saying things you’ll later regret, take a moment to collect yourself, then re-engage with your child once you’re feeling regulated again. And if you did say or do things before you managed to catch yourself that you wish you hadn’t, repair! Say sorry and make reparations.
A final word
Punishment doesn’t achieve the goals we most want to achieve as parents, at least not in the long term. And parenting is a long game. We can’t measure our success as parents by how our children act today (or indeed, how they act tomorrow, or in 10 years, or 20 years from now). In fact, we don’t really measure our success as parents by our children at all. We measure it by the way WE are as parents. It’s one thing to raise good humans who make good decisions and can control their emotions. But it’s a much more important thing to be a good human yourself, one who can model good decision making and emotional control.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! What are you taking from this into your home and family?
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How would you adapt this to a child with a developmental delay who has poor self-awareness and awareness of what others might feel? I can see that if the situation is happening right now, you might be able to catch it and communicate clearly and in context about how it makes you feel and might make the other person feel, but doing that later seems like a waste of time. Have you seen good articles on that?
The functions of any behaviour are so important to understand, otherwise we can’t teach them a more effective way to communicate what they need. Too often our own perspectives are attached to children, which isn’t useful.