Dr. Don Wood reacts to a Reddit story about a mother whose child knocked over berries at a supermarket. Instead of punishing the kid, she calmly told the cashier. Wood explains how punitive parenting creates fear and trauma, while parents often repeat what happened to them.
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This happened to me at.
A supermarket once.
There was a mother and her young boy in front of.
Me at the checkout.
The boy picked up a box of.
Berries and they went all over the floor, scattering everywhere. I braced myself because I felt the fury that was about to pour forth from the mother. But it never came. She simply let.
The cashier know and the cashier called.
For someone to clean it up. I was paralyzed watching this all unfold. My heart was racing. A guy came and cleaned it up.
I think someone in a light hearted.
Voice said, whoopsie.
It was such a.
Moment of clarity for me. That's the way a.
Mother is supposed to respond to her child. It's an accident. Don't get mad at them. Children are going to make accidents.
When I was a.
Child, that's the way that I got treated. When I made a mistake, I was never yelled at, never screamed, never hit. I would just be told what I did wrong, correct the mistake. But I never felt fear. A lot of times, and I've seen it before, where a parent will just haul off and either hit the child, scream at the child, and what's going to happen to that poor child that's going to get part of their trauma as they're growing up. So the person who wrote that comment, when she talked about being paralyzed with.
Fear, chances.
Are something either similar or same happened. May not actually have been a box of berries, but it could have been spilling the milk at her table, dropping a dish. Whatever it is, anything that looks similar or same would create that response in this woman because it would be using her own experiences as her resource to respond to this situation.