If We Shouldn't Punish Our Kids What Should We Do?

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Hi, welcome to Talking Sense, a podcast with me, Dr. Marta. I'm a clinical psychologist trained in family therapy and every week I answer one of your real life questions offering you psychological understandings, strategies and ideas to guide you. This week, before we go any further, there's another podcast that you might enjoy listening to. Why don't we check it out?

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Before we begin, I always like to take a little moment to pause to give you a little bit of a reset. Before we begin our conversation today, I would like you to try and protect a bit of time to give yourself some soothing, loving touch. We know the power that touch can have on our bodies, on our minds and on our nervous system. So just get something like a nice moisturizer and moisturize your hands, your feet, your arms, because we know that it doesn't have to come from another. We can give ourselves loving touch and it can give us the same benefits. Why not give it a try? And when you're ready, let's begin.

Today's question is about consequences, also known as punishments. And what do we do? Let's have a listen.

Hi Dr. Marta, I wonder if you'd help me on the topic of what some people might call consequences and others would call discipline. My 3 year old daughter is going through quite an angry phase at the moment and whilst I try my best to be patient and stay calm and be the voice of reason to not speak to her when she's in the midst of a tantrum to try and resolve it, and we talk a lot about feelings and why things might be happening, we've got to the stage now where she's actually being violent. So she's punching, she's smacking, she's kicking myself and my 6 month old son and so I really feel like that's where I, I draw the line. But as she's three, I know that all behavior is communication, but I, I do feel like violence really should be stopped with some sort of punishment, if that's the right word. So what I've done at the moment is I've taken away her tablet from she can't watch any of her favorite programs for a day. I didn't know if that was appropriate or there was some other way to deal with this better. So I'd really appreciate your advice on this.

Thank you so much for submitting this question. I think it's something that so many parents struggle with and yet it's something that I think can be really difficult to bring up in a conversation with other parents. But also with somebody like me. And if you are in my Instagram community, you will know that the way that I talk about parenting and strategies around our children is from a very developmental perspective. I don't think of myself as a gentle parenting expert. It probably isn't really the model that I think of when I'm in my work, both therapeutically and even as a parent. I think of myself as an authoritative parent, which means that I believe in fear, firm, loving boundaries with children, but I don't believe in threats. I also know that punishments are really ineffective. And I try and avoid using certain behavioral strategies that have been dispelled by science as being effective in the long run. And that is why I think bringing this question is really beautiful. I'm really grateful for it. And it means that we can have a really open and honest conversation without judgment. Because I think the reason why lots of parents try and not talk about the fact that they do still use punishment methods is because of people like me and books and things that they've read on social media and this idea of shame that bringing this up with other parents because it's a last resort. It's like you're clearly at the end of your tether, you don't know what else to do, so you, you resort to a punishment. But having to share that with others and being really open and honest about it is really hard. So just for a moment, just reflect on whether you use punishments with your child and how that leaves you feeling. Just think about that. And I really want to say this again, this is a no judgment space. I know lots of parents that use punishments and I understand why they reach out for these strategies. And I would also say that in my home we do our best not to use punishments at all, but every now and again they will come out of our mouths. Now what I will say is that we usually, pretty much every time will apologize, repair with our child and absolutely erase the punishment that we've just shouted or said in a very kind of, yeah, last minute resort. I need to do something in this moment and I don't know what to do. Whatever it is that you do, I want you to know there is no judgment here. But given this question, I'm going to talk about why using punishment is really ineffective and why it's not serving you and it's not serving your child. I'm also going to talk about discipline because it's really important. And I think it's interesting that we have this view that discipline means punishing a child. I don't know where we got this idea that in order to teach children to do better, we have to help them to feel worse first. So in order to learn what we know from science and neuroscience is that we need to feel good about ourselves. Our brains don't learn anything when we are under stress or under pressure or we're feeling bad. Because in those moments, what happens to our brains, whether you're a child or an adult, is that you are flooded with emotion, and emotion trumps learning. Okay? That is why one of the things I focus on a lot in podcasts, on my Instagram page, and everything that I say and do pretty much is focus on emotion first. There is a reason why you're probably all really bored of hearing me talk about emotional regulation.

But.

But it's because we know that without emotional regulation, which we often think of as a soft skill, without that, children's learning brains and their ability to develop skills, including academic skills, is absolutely hindered. Like, we know this. So if you're feeling really anxious in a classroom, you cannot learn at your best or perform at your best. Same if you're feeling, you know, angry or really upset, we know this. I mean, you know, the science is very clear and unequivocal that when emotion floods our brains, we're not learning. Okay? We are just experiencing emotion. So this is really, really important because I'm going to talk about what actually discipline is, and I'm just going to touch on it briefly because I feel like it's the foundation to what we're talking about here. And then we're going to think a little bit about consequences, punishments, and particularly with this question, but what do you do? What do you do in these moments when your child is kicking off doing something that is completely unacceptable? And I think if you're in my community for long enough, you will know discipline is really important to me. I think all parents should engage in discipline with their children. Okay? We cannot erase discipline. But discipline is not punishment. Discipline is not harshly threatening your child or hurting them. Whether it's physical or emotional, discipline, at its core is about teaching children skills. And when we get this, when we repeat it in our heads, when we go over and over and over the science and we understand, okay, to discipline means to teach, to show a child that discipline is about doing things over and over again until they learn something better. Then we learn very quickly that actually the quick fixes, the things that we think might work in the short term don't tend to last in the long term. So let's start Here, let's start talking about discipline. I've already said discipline means to teach. And I also just want you to think as an adult, you know, when you think of an adult who is very disciplined in an area, in a skill, what does it mean? I think this is a really key question. Okay. Because when we think about discipline with children, I really think that what we equate that with like in this question is a consequence, also known as a punishment. Now, that is not what discipline is. So if you think about an adult who's really disciplined, I believe most of you will come up with an idea of discipline, meaning somebody who's really committed towards a goal, someone who wants to make a plan that works and works really hard at repeating it. So, for example, being really disciplined at learning a musical instrument or at a certain sport, what does that look like? I think for many what discipline looks like is repetition, practice and learning through mistakes to do better at something. Now that is the true meaning of discipline. It is about learning. So if we are the adults in charge of discipline with our children, we need to see ourselves as coaches, we need to see ourselves as teachers. We need to see repetition and practice and feeling like children are learning bit by bit as the goal. We cannot see discipline as happening in a one off event very quickly. So often what happens with our children is that they get things wrong a lot. Even though you've told them a thousand million times to not do something, they're going to do it. Even though what you've been trying to do is be very calm around behavior that is inappropriate, or you find very difficult or challenging, when you suddenly see it in action, you're like, how many times have I got to do this? How many times have I got to teach you to not yell or not hit or, or whatever it is? Now, when we think about discipline in the context of repetition, learning, making mistakes, doing it better, and there's an end goal, a long term end goal, it can help us bring some perspective to these moments with our children that feel so repetitive and also feels like it's not working. And if that's how you feel, trust me, I get feels like it doesn't work because it doesn't work in the moment. It's a long term goal. The same way that again, if we're learning a skill like a musical instrument or playing a sport, you don't learn how to play it the first time you try. You also probably are not very good. The first year of learning something like the piano. You might just be at like a Grade one or two maximum, if you've done really well, you're not going to get to a grade nine by year one. It takes years of commitment, years of practice, years and years of repetition. Now, if this is making you have like a really bad sinking feeling, I'm really sorry. But what we need to start thinking about with our children is that a lot of what we do is for the long term, a lot of what happens in these early years is that what we're doing is building our children's brain and we're building their emotional resilience and we're building their social systems and their social communication abilities. It's building blocks. It is not finalized. It is nowhere near, close to developmentally ready to be finalized. Because in the early years, and I know this question is for a three year old, but you know, the early years in terms of the brain, until children are about eight, their brain is really little. And it's transforming in the first five years of life faster than at any other point until they reach adolescence, and then the transformation continues. But what's really key is that their brain is not fully developed. Their brain is not like ours. And in fact, in those first five years of life, and I would go as far as to say up to the age of around 8, 6 to 8, the brain has no buffer for emotion. So, so the area of the brain that really helps buffer emotional impulses, emotional reactivity, it's called the prefrontal cortex, and it's right at the front of our brains. And that helps to moderate emotion, moderate impulses, offer a buffer when really intense emotion shows up in our body. Now, that part of the brain hasn't fully switched on yet. And we know this, there is tons of science and imaging and all sorts that tell us the prefrontal cortex is really slow to mature. And it doesn't mature by the age of eight, it matures by the age of 25, and it's really, really slow. And although that might seem like an error biologically, it's actually very useful because it allows us to, as parents and our children to get things wrong. Because as it's not fully developed, the things that children are learning and the things that you are doing with your children, it means that there is more flexibility for change, flexibility for learning something different. What our prefrontal cortex is doing is saying, you've got time to figure this out. You're not going to get it right the first time. And actually it's going to take you lots of years to figure out how to manage Big emotional impulses. So for now, just experience life through emotion, through feeling. Because that's how children experience the world, through feeling, not through logic, thinking or language. Okay, little ones. And I am talking again. Up to the age of around 8, experience the world through emotions. And in some ways it's beautiful if you really think about it or our children's experience of the world is a lot richer than ours. They don't have logic, they don't have this like, you know, looking into the future. They don't think about what's coming next. They also don't think about what happened before. They just live in the here and now. And here and now is really intense for children. Okay? So when we talk about discipline, we talk about learning, we talk about practice, we talk about repetition, and we have to keep in mind our child's brain development to make sense of what we're doing and why.

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Now I'm going to kind of skip forward a little bit and we're going to move on to think about punishments and what are they? Why are they so ineffective? Why are they something that I'm not going to say definitely do this, but they are something that I want you to reflect on the times that you do use them. Okay? Because again, no judgment here. I want you to really make your own choices about how you discipline your children and I really want you to reflect on on the choices that you make. When you think about disciplining your child, these are your choices. I can't make them for you. I think the best that I can do is give you, you know, evidence based information and for you to then choose what you think is best. Now, like I said, there is no judgment here. I know so many parents who still use punishment. And for me it's about awareness of what we're doing and why. And when we have that awareness, then we can really consider whether the choices we're making are those that are the most effective for our parenting of our children and for like effective disciplining of our children or whether there are actually moments that we're using something like punishment because we're depleted and we have no idea what else to do. And we're feeling lost in that moment. And those moments are going to happen to you, to me, to everybody, because we're human. So let's start with punishment and then let's talk about what to do if we don't use them. So let's talk about punishments. What are they? So punishments actually come from the science of behavioral psychology, which is like one of the oldest forms of psychology, okay? And every single piece of evidence based and research done by behavioral psychologists is with animals. It's not humans, it's with animals. And so if you've heard of somebody known as Pavlov and his dog, he's one of the most famous kind of behavioral psychologists and he talked about things such as operant conditioning, which are about either reinforcing behaviors or punishing behaviors. And the idea is very simple that when we reinforce reward a behavior, it increases, okay? The wanted behavior kind of happens more frequently. And when we punish, when we use either positive punishments, which are about giving your child something negative, so that would be like a fear tactic or a threat or a negative punishment, which would be like removing something that your child enjoys, like removing a tablet, that would be known as a negative punishment. They decrease behavior. And they've shown that this is true for rats, for dogs, for mice. It's totally true. You know, operant conditioning is real, it's a thing. However, one of the things that we know is that humans are not animals. We're just not.

If you think about just the core of biology and you think, but we are. We're from the animal kingdom. Yes, of course we are. But we have something that dogs, cats, mice, rats simply don't have. And it's a mind. And the mind is made of both language and the ability to think and, and the ability to feel and the ability to have internal motivations, the ability to reflect on things and build relationships. Okay. Lots of animals, of course, build relationships, but they don't do so through language. And we know that language has made human brain evolve in completely different ways for from how animals have evolved. And of course, we also know that when we're talking about children, their main kind of source of support of, you know, everything really is you. For children to be able to survive, they need a parent. This isn't like mice, whose lifespans are much shorter than humans. And as soon as little ones can start to feed themselves, they run off and they go off. Okay? Operant conditioning works with animals really well because it's a survival technique. Okay? If something feels bad or it hurts them, they're going to avoid it and they're going to go to the safe place. I mean, that makes sense. We do that too. And lots of things that are kind of instinctive, like touching a flame. Flames burn and they hurt. If you've ever burnt yourself, you're going to be really careful not to do the same thing again. Okay? So those instincts, of course, they're wired in us too. Operant conditioning has its place in science and in thinking about ideas. But when it comes to parenting, when it comes to children, I don't believe that behavioral psychology is helpful at all. In fact, we've got science research with children as well as adults around punishment. And what we know is that punishment does not change the tendency to engage in behaviors. What it does is makes people try and avoid getting caught. So what children will do when they get punished is try and still do the behavior, but in a way that doesn't get them caught or that doesn't get them punished. So receiving a punishment, what tends to happen with humans is that we want to avoid the punishment, but of course, that doesn't teach children what to do instead, so that the behavior that you're not wanting to see anymore doesn't happen as frequently or as intensely. All they learn is, my parent will punish me if I do this, so I need to try and do it when they can't catch me or when I will not be punished. And that often means that children do things behind their parents back. What that often means is that punishment is one of those kind of techniques that starts to create a rupture in your relationship with your child. And by rupture, what I mean is your child loses trust in you. Your child can often start to see themselves, particularly when they're little, as bad kids. And that becomes a self perpetuating cycle. They don't trust you. They have a sense that you don't like them because you're doing something that hurts them either emotionally, physically or will upset them in the future. And what they then do is think, my parent doesn't like me because I'm a really bad kid, therefore this is hopeless, doesn't really matter. Whatever I do, I'm the bad child. And the reason why that is a self perpetuating cycle is that when kids feel feel bad about themselves in a relationship with a parent, what tends to happen is they keep doing the bad behaviors. Why would they change when it's now become a part of their identity? That's what they believe they are to you, the bad kid. And bad kids literally become bad kids. It's not because they are bad. It's because they start to believe that that is their only identity. That is the only way that they can be. Because what you say or do to them becomes absorbed, particularly in the early years before the age of five, it becomes absorbed as a part of their own self. So one of the things that we need to know with punishments and children is that the biggest consequence of all is how it impacts on our relationship with our children and how it impacts on their relationship with themselves. Punishment also doesn't teach your child anything in the moment. It suppresses behaviour. It looks like an effective strategy in the short term. If you say to your child, if you don't stop doing that, I'm taking your tablet away for a week. Often children will go, no, no, no, no, no, stop, don't do that, don't do that, don't do that. So what they're doing is stopping the punishment. They're not learning how to stop the behavior that you don't like because you haven't taught them that. They haven't learned that. So next time they're in a similar situation, you can be sure that that behavior is going to come back again. And what happens to you as the parent? What often happens is you create the same punishment until there's a moment where your child goes, I don't care. Why? Because they don't care. They've given up. And therefore one of the issues with punishments, this is only one, I'm going to give you a few more. Is that often parents escalate the punishment. Okay? Not a week, it's a month. And you also can't see your friend and will take your favorite toy away. You have to keep building up on the punishment because it stops working in the short term. Your Child stops being scared of the punishment. They're like, I don't care, I'm angry and I'm hitting out and that's what I'm doing.

Why?

So remember I said that the brain gets flooded by emotion, it doesn't learn anything. So in the moment that your child is feeling intense anger and they're lashing out uncontrollably because it's an impulse, at this age, at the early age of three, it's a complete impulse. And in that moment, what you're expecting is, remember that punishment, remember that I'm going to take away your tablet. You, if you don't stop doing this, your child's brain is not able to compute that choice. It's impossible, developmentally impossible. They haven't got that buffer in their brain, so they can't go, wait, if I hit my sibling, this means I'm not going to get a tablet. Which one do I prefer? They can't do it. So what happens in the moment is they get flooded with anger and they do the thing they know how to do. They hit out as a release, as an impulse. They're not doing it because they want you to take away the tablet again. They're doing it because they have no other way of releasing anger. What you don't teach your child, they're not able to just learn by themselves. Now, the biggest problem with punishments, really, this is the biggest problem, I think.

Is for you, because it sets you a trap. Punishments actually place fear in children and it looks like the behaviors stop again, temporarily, maybe immediately, but it's totally not effective in the long run. But what punishments do is really trick you, the adult, in feeling powerful and in control in a moment of helplessness. And so it's often when you're feeling inadequate, helpless, hopeless, at the end of your tether, exhausted, that the punishment will come out. And when we believe that punishments work, it's going to make it more likely that you use it again. And this is the biggest problem. Most of us, if you are around my age group, you will have received punishments as a child. This makes punishments familiar. This makes punishments seem like something that works. It must be effective because I had it and somehow I learnt not to hit out, so that must be how I learnt it. Now, don't kid yourselves. That wasn't how you learned it. I promise that it wasn't. You might have learned to fear your parent and not hit them out of fear, but in your adult life, if that is true for you, I really want you to reflect and really think about how do you manage anger? Now, are you somebody who, when you feel really intense anger, you lash out, you say words you don't mean to your partner or to your friends. You like yell, you scream, maybe you bang things. How did you learn to release anger healthily? And who taught you that? Now that's a really hard question. And it can be really confronting. And I know so many parents and adults I work with who have said to me honestly and openly, I've never learned how to deal with my anger. I bottle it up or yeah, it comes out as like irritation or passive aggression or yeah, it comes out the way that I just expressed it. I yell, I scream, I shout at people. That's not healthy. Anger. And anger is a very healthy emotion. Yep, anger is not bad. Anger makes us feel bad. But anger has such an important function that we are missing out on when we don't see that the role with our children is not to suppress their anger, is to teach them how to be angry. Because what anger does is help us move through things that think feel unfair and unjust. And to children, a lot of what we do with them feels unfair and unjust. When we say no to something they want, that feels really unfair. When we tell them they can't do something that feels really unfair. When their sibling gets something that they don't get, that feels really, really unfair. Why does the little one get something I don't get? Why the older one get to do things I'm not allowed to do? It's unfair. And when we see it from that point of view, we can understand that actually anger is both absolutely normal, healthy and perhaps needs to be channeled differently rather than punished.

So what works here? What works is don't just tell your child what not to do. Teach them what is expected with specific and concrete stuff steps. When your child is really angry and they're hurting their sibling, this is not okay. I'm never going to tell you this is okay. You need to be the parent in this moment and that means you need to physically intervene. That doesn't mean hurt or harm either of your children, but it might mean getting in the way of your three year old because they're little. Okay, three year olds are really little. This is the age where you can get in the way, physically stop the hitting. That might mean putting your body in between your kids. It might mean taking one of your children off the other and taking them away. But what you need to do is be really calm. Yes, that does mean stay calm. Okay, don't go in Shouting and raving at the same time. Stop, stop, stop. Instead, do it without talking. Your actions are louder than your words. And if you stay calm and you separate them and you can then say, no hitting. I'm not going to allow it. That is fine. That's important. Name what you're doing, but you don't need to add extra words. Your children are probably already shouting and screaming and crying and creating all that sensory noise. Don't add to the chaos, okay? The most confident and effective thing you can do is intervene with your body. And then you need to help your child regulate. It is pointless to try and teach your child to do something in this moment. In this moment, your child needs to release their anger, okay? And it has to be safe. It has to be okay. That means not hitting you or hitting another or hitting themselves. So you need to stay close by because you need to monitor this. But you can teach your child something like stomping their feet. Or if they've got flighty hands, which is so common in anger, teach them how to hit the floor, hit a pillow, scream in a pillow, go outside. If you've got a little courtyard or a garden, take them out and say, go on, run around, you know, stomp your feet like this. You need to model it, by the way. You need to show your child what this looks like. And they might say no, and they might try and push against you. If they're tiny, like they're three, use your arms. Stretch them out. Your child cannot hit you if you are holding them at arm's length. I mean, it's seriously impossible unless they're a giant three year old. So this isn't restraint, this is holding. And it's to keep you and them safe. Wait it out. You don't need to say a million words. You just need to say, yeah, it's okay. Let it out. You're allowed to be angry. You can't hit me. Not going to let you. But yes, Go on, shout. Roar like a lion. Ra. It's what I've taught my daughter and she does it beautifully. Now, you know, stomp your feet. It's okay.

Whack.

Whack the ground. Whack a pillow. When we teach, what we do is that we are helping our children's brains and bodies release anger, which is an energy that needs to come out of their bodies. It needs to come out and we need to show them how to do this effectively. And when they get calm, what we can do is soothe because their brain and their body's just been through Something really frightening. If your child's anger looks scary to you, I promise you it is terrifying to them. So when it's over, the consequence is that you soothe them.

Yeah.

No, the consequence is not a punishment because I'm not teaching our children anything. If what I do is say, and now I'm going to punish you, what good does that do? How does taking their tablet away teach them not to hit their sibling? If instead what I do is say, come here, have a hug. That was a lot. What I'm doing is soothing their brain. And what I am teaching their brain and their body is anger passes. And when anger passes, it can feel okay. And it can feel safe for you, for me, for your sibling. Afterwards, when a little bit of time has passed, might be a drink, might be a snack. Yep, I'm still not punishing my child, but I may sit down with them at some point and say, you know, when anger shows up, sometimes it makes your arms and your feet want to hit out. And I get it because anger feels really strong and it feels really bad. But we can't hit each other. So here are some things that you can do in the moment. And again, show them the stomping, the whacking, the roaring, the screaming in a pillow. And you can say to your child, and when those moments come, you can come to me and I will help you. Don't hit your sibling. Instead say, no, mummy, help me or daddy come and I will come. I will help you. What you're saying to your child here is, I'm not scared of your anger. I'm not going to punish your anger. I'm going to help you feel this soothed, this good. When anger shows up, I'm going to show you how to feel safe with it. And that is one thing that punishments will never teach your child. So remember this, punishments will make your child feel bad. But you using effective discipline, by using skills based teaching and developmentally appropriate actions, words and behaviors will teach your child's brain even before it's got that buffer that isn't built in before the ages of somewhere between 6 and 8. Even before then, it's going to start teaching your child's brain how to manage anger. And if you don't believe me, you just have to give it a go. It takes a long time. I promise it's a process. And I also will be very honest about it. I've been through it with my own child. It is not your fault that children are hitting out. It is part of development, it is part of temperament. And anger is a really strong emotion that we need, we need to use effectively and you know, one day my hope is that lots of these children who are now being brought up with parents just like you, what happens is that they grow up to be adults who know how to engage with their anger and have a healthy relationship with their anger. That doesn't make them lash out at others or lash out at themselves. That doesn't leave them feeling with shame, but instead helps them meet their own needs, that they've got assertiveness skills, that they can say no when things feel unfair and still do it in a way that is appropriate, in a way that doesn't hurt themselves or anybody else.

And we're coming to an end. Thank you for joining me on another Talking Sense podcast. Now, if you are in my community on Instagram, you may have seen that I have some very big news. I have just announced my first book, how to be the Grown up and you can pre order it now on Amazon. I have also added the link in the caption if you'd like to look at it and find out a little bit more. I hope it will be a useful resource for all of you. And if you enjoy my podcast, I think you're gonna really enjoy my book. Every week I like to end with a little mantra to hold you. And this week, given our conversation, my mantra to you is I can only control myself. I wish you a restful and peaceful week and look forward to talking with you again on another Talking Sense. Until then, see you soon.

Foreign.

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Danger lurks in the American landscape.

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