When kids graduate from diapers and breast milk, it starts. They form opinions and think for themselves, which occasionally leads to piss-poor decision-making. My kids were no different. Discipline is necessary if you want to keep kids away from drugs and parole officers. Husband and I had to figure out a way to teach our children, which is what disciple, the root of the word discipline, actually means. It doesn’t mean beat into submission or punish. Discipline is a teaching tool.
We insist our children show respect, honor their families and themselves, and eventually shut the fuck up and go to sleep. This takes some doing.
My first crisis was when they were teething and biting one another. I tapped them on the butt, then the lips, as encouragement to behave appropriately. When that didn’t work, I pulled the same move my Nana had pulled with me 30 years earlier. I took a finger and gently bit, with just enough strength to show that biting doesn’t feel good. I hoped they would remember that the next time.
No such luck.
So, I got sad and shook my head, picking up the injured brother and showering him with love and kisses. The biter was immediately ashamed. He cried and put himself in timeout. Spanking and biting = 0. Guilt and manipulation = 1.
Like me, most of my friends were spanked as children and do not spank their own. When pressed for an explanation, not one said this was because they felt they were psychologically damaged for getting spanked. Quite the opposite, actually; those of us who were spanked believed we probably deserved it.
No one condones bare-bottom, prolonged hits on a child bent over the knee, but a few have popped their kids once or twice on the butt when they were little, and stopped because it didn’t do much good. You see, spanking isn’t a hit with us, because it doesn’t produce the desired results.
It also makes so many of us feel… icky.
According to the people in my circles, if you want your kids to fear you, or cry, or be confused about inconsistent messages like “We are going to hit you to show that hitting is wrong,” go ahead and spank them. If you want your child to behave appropriately, or make better choices, then spanking is not the discipline of choice.
Like anything else, it depends on the kid. Over the years, Husband and I tried different teaching methods, like the cold shower, for example. We hoped it’d cure temper tantrums in toddlers like it cured libidos in my college boyfriends. Come to think of it, the results were about the same. Oldest would stand with arms folded, and ask, indignantly, “Is this how you treat your gift from God?”
If my kids said something like “shit” or “go Eagles,” I’d wash their mouths out with soap. This worked only if done calmly, while explaining the difference between grown-up words and bad words, and how they weren’t quite old enough to utter either.
In recent years, making them write 75 nonviolent ways to resolve an argument worked wonders when they thought wrestling matches were the answer to disagreements.
The need for discipline doesn’t go away. If anything, older boys need just as much guidance as they did when they were younger. I have found that disappointed is a whole lot more effective than angry.
I do what works.
According to sociologist Murray Straus, the preference for spanking tends to fall along socioeconomic lines. More educated parents have more of an aversion to spanking than the uneducated. Using logic and reason, obviously, requires that you have some yourself.
A rational and loving approach, which generally does not involve striking someone, yields more of the desirable behavior and less of the shit you don’t want to see. Isn’t that the real goal of discipline? If you respond to age-appropriate behavior with anger and enjoy hitting children, then perhaps you’re the one with the problem. And you deserve more than a grown-up spanking.
Catherine Durkin Robinson can be found online at outinleftfield.com and dailyloafblog.com. She’ll read from her work at the CL Fiction Contest Winners’ Reading in CL Space, Sun. Jan. 8 at 7:30 p.m.
