The Truth About Parenting with Punishments
Punishments are a necessary tool of parenting. Taking away a phone, gaming time, television time, and time with friends are all common ways to punish children. As a parent, having the ability to take away something a child values is often the only way you can get them to do something.
However, the truth is that punishments are band-aids. They don’t last forever and kids know this. Furthermore, the more often punishments are used the better kids get with dealing with them. As a result, both the threat of a punishment and the act of punishing must be used sparingly.
Over the years I’ve learned that long lectures, self-reflection activities, and routine changes actually work better than punishments anyway.
Driving Behavior Changes Without Using Punishments
Long Lectures
Long lectures often cut into a child’s time doing other things that they’d rather be doing. Often this is a punishment in itself, but a punishment with a purpose.
The purpose is to help the child understand why their particular behavior was so egregious. This includes talking through all the steps that led to the current moment, the alternatives that may have prevented the situation, and the new knowledge that must be acquired to learn from the situation.
Self-Reflection Activities
Assigning your kid self-reflection homework is a great follow-up for a lecture. As you could probably guess, kids hate this stuff but it’s a great learning tool for them.
Self-reflection is one of he most important aspects of behavior change.
Having them write an essay about their behavior or a summary of the lecture you just gave them are both worthwhile activities. If writing is not an option, you could have them create a video or do some other artistic project with self-reflection as the center piece.
Routine Changes
I find that routine changes are the best way to drive true behavior changes. Whereas punishments are temporary, routine changes are permanent. It could be defining a new wake-up or bed time, a new morning or after school routine, or building a new dietary, reading, or homework habit.
Routines are the foundation for change. If you could only do one thing, this would be it.