We have already told many times how unhelpful the punishments are, but we also know and everyone is very clear that educating is not easy. I am sure that many of us have found ourselves in some situation in which the punishment has turned against us, "because we did not go out to dinner" (and you have just self-punished yourself without also leaving). These are some of the problems we are going to encounter when we punish without thinking very well what we are doing.
We should use other tools to correct the behavior of our children, but I believe that if at some point we decide that we should punish our children, the punishment should be at least proportional and appropriate to the age of the children and of course taken up to the end.
When we punish ourselves unintentionally
I must admit that I have found myself in that situation more than once and twice. When we punish him without going out to dinner or going to see a movie, or anything else, it causes us to be affected and eventually pay just for sinners, as they say.
When we don't even believe what we are saying
How can we expect our children to take us seriously if we don't even believe in punishment? There are complicated days and other very bad days, when fatigue accumulates and that more than a room, our room looks like a boxing ring in which both adults and children challenge each other to see who is the king of the mountain.
"As you do not pick up your toys, I throw them all in the trash", "as you do not start eating the vegetables I put three more dishes"Are we sure we are going to throw away the toys or are we going to put three plates of vegetables, sure we are going to spend the night in front of our son until four plates of vegetables are finished?
The problem is that we get hot and that many times we resort to the tactics that our parents used with us, to realize that everything seemed easier at the time. What we thought of being a father was cool because you were the only one who could punish was another big lie. Punishments come out as a result of frustration, fatigue or ignorance of other "more productive and less frustrating" tactics.
And is that this type of punishment or rather threats, they can get us into situations quite comics depending on the curiosity of our children. And nothing better than a real case between a father, which in this case was me and two children (my children), reacting to the same threat in different situations.
One of the "threats" I used to use with my children was that if they didn't pick up their toys, I would throw them away. Normally after the initial five or ten minutes in which it seems that I speak in Swedish and after another five of protests, they tend to pick up. I remember once, when the oldest was about four years old I had to appear in the room with a bag that we used for garbage and start putting toys in it to start collecting everything I had taken out. The side effect is that I left in a corner the bag with the three or four toys that "supposedly" was going to throw and there it was forgotten until almost a year later.
The same situation happened to me more than a year ago with the little one, I appeared with the bag and made a risk of putting toys in the bag. At that point, the little boy decided to pick up and when he was carrying three dolls, he looks at me, points to the bag and lets me go "anyway dad, there are not going to fit all my toys." Of course I had to get out of there before I couldn't stand the laugh and that was the last time I threatened to throw the toys in the trash.
We must also take into account the age of our children since normally, our credibility in the face of such threats is inversely proportional to their age and the severity of the same, provided they are old enough to understand what the punishment is, of course, because threatening to punish a two-year-old child only serves to remind him of the same thing half an hour later, when he does again what we have told him not to do.
Even so, there are parents who, in order to maintain their position, have passed in the execution
I think that most of us know that there are certain types of threats that remain in theory and will not go beyond, usually "work", to call it somehow, thanks to which the imagination of our children expands a lot faster and with greater force than his ability to reason and thus the most varied things are believed.
The problem begins when these threats do not work, either because they sound like science fiction or because in that small brain of yours they consider it a good idea to see how the threat is fulfilled, yes, children are sometimes quite reckless. This forces us to the common of the mortals to happen to a plan B, normally chosen during the march, but of course, there are parents and parents and some choose to take their threats to the end.
If we search online we will see many cases of parents who have reached extremes that we can hardly justify.
- Parents who put their own child on sale through the newspaper: I recognize that once the children have a behavior that leaves enough to be desired, that meets a thousand other things in our adult lives that magnify the disaster even more and that you want to tell your partner "there I leave them, I leave them I'm going for a walk ", but from there on I want to sell it ... What can come to mind for such a "crushed"?What is this fight going to do for you?
Parents who abandoned their son in a forest because he misbehaved: Ok, your son is giving you the trip and that is difficult to manage and you can think of that "in the first gas station I see I leave you there", but one thing is to think about it and another thing to do it. And of course, one must think when doing one of these that the kid is going to stay there waiting for someone to come back for him, as long as our son does not believe that you are able to leave him "lying" and not come back for him, so he decides to move on his own. Luckily, in this case there was a happy ending and Everyone learned the lesson.
Parents who sent to shave their child for bad behavior: This is another of the "big" ideas that some parents understand by "channeling" their children. In this case, the parents had the boy looking like the young grandfather of the town for four days until, according to them, he learned the lesson and improved his behavior.
These cases have become viral on social networks and have had a lot of applause, as well as detractors, of course. You just have to search the networks to see how many such cases exist. And the problem is not that they came up crossing the line between discipline and abuse, but there are many other parents who applaud this type of action.
I do not believe that one earns the respect of others through this type of action, through threats and blackmail. We are parents and we are human, it is understandable that at some point we are wrong and do not react as expected of us, but for me there is a very clear thing, humiliating no respect, fear is created, two feelings that many parents confuse but that They have nothing to do with it.
