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Thanks for the post. I find parents who don’t discipline their kids kind of sad; I spent a lot of time with my grandparents growing up, my grandmother probably hit me twice and my grandfather probably three or four times between the ages of 4 and 12, but by god that made us behave. Kids need a lot of love but a little fear, I think.
More generally, I think significant introspection is a bad idea. The happiest people (unironically Donald Trump) seem to do very little introspection at all.
As a parent, parents who "gentle parent" almost universally have awful kids to be around. Our kids are generally very well behaved (twins age 5) to the point that it's not uncommon to get complimented at the store about it. We follow the "reprove betimes with sharpness, followed by an increase in love" approach. We like being around our kids.
Whenever my kids have play dates with gentle parented kids, the amount of yelling, mean things, stealing toys, hitting, breaking things (ours or their own) is genuinely shocking. But you know, even our kids sometimes act out, what's annoying is that there is no discipline in the moment. The moms just take the kids and be like "ohhh dear oh no, are you having some big feelings?" And then kid goes right back to it after sitting with his mom for a few seconds. Sadly, these moms also often complain that they can't control their kids! We saw one really awful moment with one of these where a 4 year old smacked his mom at Church (hard enough that people gasped). She got embarassed (understandably) but then kinda just went, "aww, yeah, he just does that haha", again, understandable when tons of people are around but, i know for a fact that it happens at home too.
like, i guess we just have no qualms or even see it as a point of pride to calmly and sternly take our kids out of a situation to correct the behavior. And i think it shows! And we vastly prefer to hang out with kids of parents who are more like us!
Sound like the direction my wife was taking with out daughter, before I put my foot down and said we must discipline her. We don't have to let her act the way she's acting. She'll probably freak out and throw a giant tantrum. It probably won't work, effectively, at least at first. But calmly doling out consequences for actions will work. I wasn't even proposing anything bonkers. Just sending our daughter to her room when she talked back and refused more gentle corrections to cease.
My wife pushed back claiming that sounded "abusive". She claimed nearly all corrective measures were "abusive". She'd swallowed some bonkers gentle parenting bullshit. The problem was, our kid would walk all over her until she blew up at the kid about what a shitty brat she was acting like. This seemed far worse, to me, than just calmly sending our daughter to her room.
I won that argument, one of the few I have won, and after sending our daughter to her room for a week when she back talks, it stopped. For whatever reason my wife, after that resounding success, said she didn't think it worked. I was utterly baffled, and asked why she thought that, our daughter has almost completely stopped back talking. She said she didn't know, she just felt like it didn't work.
Can't win em all I guess.
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Working in a childcare setting (don't worry, I'm not dealing directly with the kids), the whole point of the "oh no, are you having a moment?" stuff is follow-through. You help the kid identify their feelings (angry, frustrated, etc.) and then you go on to coping strategies ('we don't bite/throw stuff/hit when we feel sad/angry, what we do is....') and what behaviour is acceptable and what is not. No yelling or smacking but you don't just let it go.
Kids go through a biting phase, all kids. That's why we have a written-down biting policy in place to be followed. But if the kid continues to bite (as per one case recently) that's when you get the therapist or educational psychologist or whomever involved.
So mom may be embarrassed and that might be good if it motivates her to start follow-through, but if she's going to go with "he just does that" then it's bad parenting. She's probably let him have his way up to now, and he will have a melt-down if she tries to discipline him, and she doesn't know how to cope with that (and feels bad if he starts crying because she made him feel sad like a big meanie) but sometimes you do have to be a big meanie for the betterment of your kid.
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When I was little, I was disciplined a couple of times by hair-pulling, and it made me too fearful of parents and their reaction to, say, meet with friends outside of normal meeting times, which in turn contributed to my social life only really getting going once I moved away from home to university (19 in theory, 20 in practice since I returned to home city for conscription in the nearby brigade).
Jesus, that sounds horrific. There's something intimate and hateful about it?
I was given Tobasco as a punishment for swearing (which led to a long-term love of hot sauce and hatred of Tobasco) and was hit with a spoon maybe once a year. The spoon broke when I was 14, and then after that control was exerted more through money etc.
All that to say I now have a good relationship with my parents.
Within the Finnish cultural context of the era, at least, it was the most common form of physical punishment (already illegal at this point, but these things take time to percolate through culure) and considered a lighter punishment to spanking.
Genuine question, because I don’t know- in countries where it’s illegal, is corporal punishment an ‘everyone does it, just don’t brag about it on social media’ thing, or is there some kind of alternate discipline method in common use, or what? I don’t get the impression of all those kids acting like they never got spanked.
I think those countries generally being more affluent might help.
My parents never used corporal punishment, but we were also well-off, so they had the option of taking away things that less well-off kids wouldn't have had in the first place.
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I once remember some younger people (like 20s) expressing astonishment that physical punishment would still happen in middle-class families during my times. I would guess still happens but as a low-class thing, not something that a sensible person would do.
The methods of discipline are the usual - shame, go to your room, no allowance and so on. I guess the modern Nordic societies just rely most of all on internalized discipline and social pressure.
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