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DISCIPLINE: THIS HURTS ME MORE THAN IT HURTS YOU
Discipline, that fine art of getting children to behave in a way that meets the standards of their family and community, is hard. So hard that when I invited the 1,050 people who responded to my research survey on parenting to fill in an open blank with the answer to “what they enjoyed least” when it came to raising kids, the largest grouping of answers, just under a third, offered some variation on “discipline”: “Enforcing rules, taking away privileges.” “I don’t like having to punish my children.” “Discipline. I know it’s important to have consequences, but it is still hard to discipline.” “When I have to be hard on my kids to teach them right from wrong.” “Having to make rules for them and stick with it.” “Having to take stuff away for bad behavior.” “Punishing my child, even though I know it’s for his own good.”
There’s the minor stuff: run-of-the-mill issues such as reining in the child who would prefer to run amok in the grocery store, tear across the parking lot, skip the homework, and stay out late with her friends. Then there’s the major stuff. No child, no matter how well and tenderly taught right from wrong, gets through childhood without blowing it big-time, and suddenly, the guidance that is everyday parenting does not feel like enough. There must be consequences. Time-outs. Lost privileges. Lectures. Grounding. And there will be recriminations—yours, at a minimum. Did you not teach this child right? Tell her not to draw on the back of the couch, bite her brother until he bleeds, put the dog in the wagon and push it down the driveway, use your iTunes password to spend $243 on in-app purchases, smoke pot?
Of course you did. Or you tried. And while tomorrow may be the day to review those lessons (and tonight the night to think about how you’re conveying them), first comes the moment when the child who has really done wrong is standing in front of you, and that moment is hard. For that matter, all those little moments in the grocery stores, parking lots, and at dining room tables don’t feel so great, either.
That kind of discipline—the things-are-going-wrong kind—is just one small piece of a much larger picture. Yet here we are, so many of us, all balled up about the same thing. I called one of my favorite thinkers on parenthood, Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, to ask why. He’s a pediatrician and an author. He’s also a happy parent himself. “What’s the first thing you would say,” I asked him, “to a parent who told you discipline was his ‘least favorite thing’?”
“Oh, no!” he shouted into the phone with his trademark enthusiasm. “You have to remember what the word means—to teach or to guide in a loving way. Not to punish, not to control, never to harm. Its root is ‘disciple.’ When you understand that your role is to be a teacher, everything changes.” Those dreaded moments? Yes, they show up, he agreed, but most of discipline, he argued, is role modeling. “It’s not a taking away. It’s not punishment. It’s guiding a kid to navigate the world safely.”
In other words, if you think of discipline as an iceberg, what we dislike about it is just the 10 percent that’s sticking up above the water. We hate the enforcement. But it’s the 90 percent of what we do to teach our children how to be, both at home and in the world, that really matters. It’s also that 90 percent that gives the pointy, frosty 10 percent strength. If we can shift our narrative around the 10 percent moments to make them just part of a larger whole, we might be able to feel better about discipline overall.
For Dr. Ginsburg, that change in how we think and talk about discipline is key to improving our entire approach. “We’ve got a cultural and a personal narrative around this that needs to change,” he said. Not only is most of our job in this area positive, as we model personal responsibility and guide our children toward self-control, but even the piece we dread shouldn’t worry us the way it does. We see the moment when our child doesn’t live up to our expectations as a sign that our normal approach has failed—after all, if it had worked to teach them right from wrong in the first place, we wouldn’t be having to enforce the lesson, right? But this is when we fail ourselves, because those moments, because children, whether they’re toddlers or tweens or teens, don’t get everything right the first time, and they don’t learn just by listening. They learn by exploring, pushing the boundaries, and having things go wrong—and that last part, where things go wrong, doesn’t really mean the larger process has hit a wall. Instead, big strikeouts are part of the game. Our job as parents isn’t to prevent them from happening. It’s to help our children see what happened and learn to navigate so that things go better next time.
Dr. Ginsburg isn’t alone in seeing value and even potential joy in our children’s most challenging moments. “The behaviors that are the most challenging, and that drive us the craziest, are actually telling us something really important,” says Tina Payne Bryson, a psychotherapist and the coauthor (with Dan Siegel) of No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind. “They are telling us the specific areas in which our kids need teaching, support, and skill-building. Instead of focusing on what we need to take away from our kids for them to learn their lesson, think instead of what we need to provide for them to learn so that they become self-disciplined.”
What Goes Wrong
Before we start trying to think about discipline differently, let’s figure out how we got here. Had you surveyed a thousand parents a hundred years ago, or in any decade over most of the last century, it’s unlikely that “what they liked least” would have coalesced around discipline. Our parents, and most parents before them, were largely in agreement about how children should behave, and how their parents should go about getting them to do just that. “Most people parenting teenagers now,” Dr. Ginsburg said, “would have been raised by authoritarian parents. It’s a high-rules, low-warmth style,” he said, which isn’t to say it isn’t meant lovingly. “It’s ‘my house, my rules.’” Most of our parents would have experienced a similar style themselves. Adults who grew up in the middle class in the ’50s and ’60s often describe being disciplined at home and at school with a paddle, strap, ruler, or switch.
Corporal punishment isn’t a necessary piece of the authoritarian style (spanking has been a matter of debate for hundreds of years), but few questioned the need for some form of punishment, even if it took the form of being sent to bed without dinner or missing an anticipated event rather than a spanking. As a general rule, people believed there was a clear connection between punishing a child and reducing bad behavior.
For most parents today, the clarity of that simple cycle of transgression and punishment is gone. In its place we have a better understanding of how a too-heavy parental hand can push a child away and even lead to an increase in risky behaviors later. But while there’s a consensus among experts like Dr. Ginsburg about the balanced style of parenting that should replace the “my way or the highway” approach (more on that shortly), there’s not a lot of societal agreement on what, exactly, we should be doing to achieve that balance. That can mean that we parents feel a lot of angry glares in public places when we don’t do whatever it is we’re supposed to do to control our kids. Many of us favor a “positive discipline” approach, which rewards the right behavior rather than reacts to problem behavior, but this can leave you at a loss when the only rewardable behavior available at the grocery store is that the child didn’t actually flip over the cart.
But there’s more to what makes discipline tough for us than our personal struggles. In many respects, we face a different disciplinary landscape than our parents. Technology is a part of it, as are changing norms about how people speak to one another, how they behave and dress in public, and how the people and institutions around us treat questions about discipline and authority. A few decades or less ago, a student who rolled her eyes at a teacher could expect a detention while a student who called a classmate “fat” would be met with a shrug; today those responses are reversed. Like it or not (and if you’re asking, I think both merit a disciplinary response), that’s the world most of us send our children out into. At the same time, being called out for misbehavior by a neighbor, another kid’s parent, or a stranger was common for a child not long ago; now it’s rare. One reason discipline feels more painful to us as parents is that more than any generation before us, we’re solo. Add in the incredibly high expectations we have for ourselves, and you have a recipe for feeling inadequate.
Our children are also more supervised than any generation that came before them, which has shifted how we convey our behavioral expectations as well. Because we’re usually with our kids, we rely heavily on the power of our “no” rather than teaching our children how to behave without our guidance, and for their part, our children lean on our presence. Because we’re always available to smooth things over, they’re less likely to have experienced the consequences of rude or inappropriate behavior in a public setting. Meanwhile, we expect our constant attendance itself to be enough to get the job done. We show up relentlessly, as though looking for a good attendance award, when we might teach our children more by being less present.
“We kind of want to professionalize child-rearing,” says Ylonda Gault Caviness, the author of Child, Please: How Mama’s Old-School Lessons Helped Me Check Myself Before I Wrecked Myself. “We feel like, if we have this input, we should get this kind of outcome. We’re very organized and we’ve got Google Calendar and date nights with each child and we’re doing all the things. But it’s not just a formula you can plug in.”
That doesn’t have to mean we’re not doing a decent job, even if it doesn’t look like it every minute. The biggest thing that “goes wrong” when it comes to discipline is the nature of children and teenagers. Children push and test and forget and act on impulse. Teenagers do the same, with the addition of more freedom, more hormones, more knowledge, and on occasion even less self-control. They’re being exactly who they need to be to turn into the adults they’ll someday become, but that isn’t necessarily easy for the adults who are trying to get them there. Looked at in this light, discipline, even the enforcement bit, is just parenting.
The last thing on my checklist of “why discipline is actually really hard” is that we get almost no control over when we need to bring it to the table. In fact, things nearly always come up at the hardest possible moment. A late commute after a long week at work during a month of stress over your father’s health and the possibility that you may need to move the family halfway across the country for your partner’s job? Why yes, thank you, that’s exactly when your children will offer up their very biggest challenges. So often, when we feel empty of any ability to give, our kids force us to reach deep into our well.
We’re muddling through a foggy landscape of societal expectations and changing norms, charged with reining in young people who are designed to resist at every turn. We can’t control when we’ll be called upon to produce some form of “discipline” out of our magic bag of parenting tricks. So what can we do to make this least-favorite aspect of being a parent better? Enough to make a big difference. We can take a cue from Dr. Ginsburg and start thinking about it differently, which might change our behavior not just when we’re on the disciplinary “spot,” but when we’re off as well. We can shift our approach and adjust how much we let others second-guess us or get under our skin when we’re not doing what they would do. And we can feel happier about how we express our approach, to ourselves, to others, and to our children.
Here’s what we can’t control: the result.
And that is why discipline can be so overwhelming, even terrifying. “Discipline” is both a verb and a noun. We use it in order to teach it. If your child reaches the age of eighteen without having ever eaten a fruit or vegetable, unable to do a load of laundry, and still putting soccer ahead of homework, college and adult life may involve some rude awakenings (or possibly scurvy). She’ll cope. But without discipline, it’s hard to successfully enter any part of adult life at all, and the worst part is, we can’t know how much our children have learned until they’ve been tested by something we can’t control. There are no guarantees. Everybody hates that.
But there is some really good advice. And if you can find a happy peace with this arguably most-challenging aspect of parenthood, you’ll find that happiness extending into nearly every other challenge, because discipline troubles are a piece of everything that makes raising a family less fun, from miserable mornings to horrible homework to vicious vacations. Make this better, and a whole lot of other things fall into place.
Making It Better: Bring Your Best Self
Discipline may be the overall practice of teaching a child how to behave in the larger world, but for most of us, especially if we’re naming it as our “least liked thing,” what we’re thinking of are the tough spots. Insisting that chores be done is discipline. Maintaining expectations for homework and public behavior is discipline. But what pulls us up short and makes us hold our head in our hands is what we need to do when the chores aren’t done and the expectations aren’t met and one child is kicking you in the shin while another is on the phone trying to explain how her friend ran out of gas on the highway on the way to the concert you said she couldn’t go to. That’s where the rubber hits the road.
Among the biggest challenges for me when it comes to that form of discipline is that I have to be the grown-up. Sometimes my children just plain make me mad. They look up at me and flat-out deny biting a sibling while I’m examining their distinctive tooth marks in a plump baby leg. They scream, “No! I no want p-butter!” And in waving their arms to make their point, they knock the plate and sandwich out of my hand. They saunter off to begin slowly making their lunch when I announce that it’s time to get in the car for school.
I am human. I get angry, I get hurt, I get frustrated, disappointed, and upset. All of that is allowed, but when it comes to teaching my children to master their own worst selves at tough moments, I obviously can’t start from there. Instead, I must first discipline myself. My hair is not on fire. There is nothing wrong. I can take the time to climb down off the ceiling before I do anything else.
This is difficult when you have very young children, particularly when their demands mean we aren’t getting the sleep we require, doing the things we need to do to care for ourselves, or finding time for things we enjoy. It’s also difficult with older children and teenagers, from whom we expect more, and who know how to push our buttons in very special ways. In fact, it’s just plain difficult. Sometimes we’ll find ourselves in situations with our children where it’s easy to enforce our family rules or values warmly, calmly, and firmly. More often, we’ll be doing it while dealing with a cascade of emotions within ourselves. Whether you’ve always struggled with a hot temper, a passive-aggressive streak, or impulse control or whether you’ve generally operated on an even keel, children can bring you to heights of rage you’ve have never before experienced, unless you’re employed in a workplace where your colleagues intentionally drop your mobile phone into the toilet.
When I say as much to Dr. Ginsburg, he maintains his enviable calm. The problem, he tells me, is that we need to expect the tough moments. It’s not if your child will do something that’s over-the-top infuriating, disappointing, or even frightening. It’s when. If you see even the worst-seeming problems as part of a bigger picture that’s inevitably full of ups and downs, you can take a deep breath, pull your shoulders down out of your ears, and quiet the voices in your mind telling you that you have failed as a parent, or that this child is just like you and will screw up just like you did. “Look,” he says. “It’s not a tiger. It’s almost never a tiger. A D on a test is not a tiger, shoplifting is not a tiger, an arrest for underage drinking is not a tiger.” In other words, even the biggest crisis is probably not immediately life-threatening. You don’t need that adrenaline-charged reaction your body is offering. You have time to deal with what’s in front of you calmly, as an adult, helping a child to learn from her experience and go forward. Sounds good, right? Here’s what I learned about how to get there.
RESPOND, DON’T REACT
It’s hard to teach our children to try to do what we as adults are likely struggling with in the very moment of the teaching. Both you and your child need to master your immediate desires, fears, and emotions in a way that allows you to move toward your long-term goals, and you’re supposed to be leading the way. The screaming child in the grocery cart who wants a lollipop doesn’t really want to be screaming. She wants to be a happy, comforted child (preferably not in the cart, or at the grocery store at all, but with a lollipop). And we don’t really want to be the purple-faced grown-up screaming back. We want to be peacefully at home with our groceries and a happy child (lollipop entirely your call). Getting from point A to point B takes discipline inside and out.
The more we struggle with disciplining our own response to our children’s behavior, the more likely we are to be struggling with our children. There’s neuroscience behind this. In his book Hardwiring Happiness, neuropsychologist Rick Hanson describes our brain’s “reactive mode”—the place we go when we “feel apprehensive or exasperated, pulled in different directions.”
A brain in reactive mode is not a brain that’s thinking clearly. “Adrenaline and cortisol course through the blood, and fear, frustration, and heartache color the mind,” he writes. “The reactive mode assumes there are urgent demands, so it’s not concerned about your long-term needs.” Your brain is offering a stress response better suited to fleeing a cheetah than to soothing either a child or yourself, and that doesn’t help.
“If we’re emotionally chaotic and reactive in discipline moments, we’re making it less likely we can effectively teach our kids,” says Tina Bryson. Our stress response activates our children’s stress response in return. “When we are reactive, angry, unpredictable, our children’s primitive brains are getting the ‘threat’ signal, and the brain cares first about safety. No learning can be done when kids don’t feel safe.”
When the parents we surveyed spent more time punishing, yelling, or hashing over the rules of the house, those parents (particularly those with younger children) felt less satisfied with their role as parents. When discipline feels like a problem, it becomes an even bigger problem.
The alternative to that “reactive mode” is a “responsive mode,” in which our brains, not feeling disturbed by a sense that our safety, satisfaction, or connections are at risk, can remain at rest even in response to challenges. To keep our minds from snapping into reactive mode, we need to stop seeing our child’s bad behavior as a threat to ourselves. If you can stay focused on the “teaching” side of discipline—the 90 percent—it’s easier to get through these more difficult moments calmly, because they don’t feel as fraught. You know that your immediate response here isn’t some sort of ultimate parenting test, with a win-or-lose result ahead.
But that’s not always easy to remember. The reactive mode often overwhelms us, especially when the disciplinary crisis is sudden, feels big, and comes at a rough moment. What can we do to pull ourselves out of what Dr. Hanson calls “the red zone” before we pull everyone else in, too? First, he told me, label it. “Just softly in your own mind put some words to what you’re feeling,” he says. “‘I’m so mad, so freaked out, I want to hit that kid, I want to scream.’ Name it as neutrally as you can.” Then, he says, buy yourself some time. “We make mistakes when we’re moving and speaking too quickly. Pause, slow down. Imagine yourself observing from the outside of a glass wall, or think of a video camera in the corner, recording this to play later.”
Do the best you can to calm your body. “Exhale,” he says. “It activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Lift your gaze to the horizon, which engages the circuits in your brain to take a panoramic view.” Above all, he says, remind yourself how safe you are. There is nothing wrong. You’re not denying the situation. You’re just helping yourself calm it down. “We’re very quick to move to alarm about our children and our partners,” he says. “We go straight to ‘everything’s falling apart.’ Take a moment to remind yourself of the actual possible consequences of what’s in front of you. You’re not sick, no one’s dying, you’re not going bankrupt, there’s no terminal illness.” Basically, everything is okay.
Take the time you need for this process. Your child can wait, in time-out, in her room, with a partner or an older child, for you to respond—not react—when you’re ready. Forgive yourself, too, if you react before you can stop yourself. You don’t have to get it right every time. If the situation merits it, bring your response to the table when you’re able; if not, let things blow over. This is an area where most parents get more opportunity to practice than we ever imagined.
WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO?
If only, once you were ready to respond, you were all set with the formula that would lead straight back to the road to happiness for all, with a quick stop at the I’m-so-sorry-I’ll-never-do-it-again service area.
Sadly, it’s the nature of many of the most difficult discipline dilemmas that they’re unpredictable, varied, and specialized. It’s not just that your child is having a tantrum over cookies, but that you promised her cookies before her tonsil surgery tomorrow and now the bakery only has peanut butter cookies, which you can’t get because your visiting nephew is allergic and everything else is closed. One child hit the other, but you know good and well that the other probably asked for it, even though you only saw the hit. The child caught at the party where there was alcohol has a plane ticket to compete with her team in the national debate championships tomorrow. You thought you’d know what to do in those situations—no tantrums, no hitting, no drinking—but it’s never a nice, clear case of this-then-that.
When I complained to Dr. Ginsburg that the trouble with discipline is that it’s impossible to know what the right thing to do is when things start going wrong, I expected enthusiastic sympathy, because Dr. Ginsburg is a dad, because he really gets the challenges of parenting, and because he is never not enthusiastic.
Instead, I got another swift correction. No, he said. We do know what to do—or at least, we know how parents should be and that can guide us to the best response. “There’s a ton of research out there that shows that there is a right way to do this,” he said, and he quickly offered up a primer on the four parenting styles—three bad, one good—that researchers have developed over the years. There’s the high rules/low warmth “authoritarian” style many of us experienced; the high warmth/low rules “permissive” style, in which a parent is more of a friend; the low rules/low warmth disengaged parent, who believes “kids will be kids” and “they’ll figure it out”; and, finally, the ideal rules-and-warmth pairing found in the balanced, or “authoritative” parent, who provides firm boundaries around issues of safety and morality and warm, supportive guidance around everything else.
So while there may not be one right thing to do, there is a right approach. “We do know what to do, or at least how to do it,” says Dr. Ginsburg. “Striking the right balance that includes attention to monitoring, while not smothering, is scientifically proven to matter.” Happier parents of young children are more hands-on when it comes to discipline, stepping into an argument between friends to model listening and problem-solving, demonstrating how to complete a chore, or keeping a close eye on adherence to screen-time rules, but as children grow older, those parents are stepping back to allow kids a chance to show their self-discipline—and, if that doesn’t go well, stepping forward to help, only to step back again a few weeks or months later. Dr. Ginsburg is quick to list just a few benefits of that dance: kids whose parents offer authority when needed and support the rest of the time have lower levels of depression and anxiety and lower rates of drug use; they’re half as likely to be in a car crash; they start sexual experimentation later.
Of course, knowing how you want to be doesn’t always tell you what to actually do, no matter what Dr. Ginsburg says. That’s the balanced parent catch-22: we must be flexible but firm. We need to take circumstances and who our child is into account, but not to the point of compromising safety, morality, or our child’s belief in us as a guiding light in a cloudy world. So, the bakery tantrum on the night before a scary surgery might merit a soothing compromise, the hitting child might get a pass this time, the child on her way to the debate tournament might not have to let down her team, but she might have just gained an unexpected chaperone.
When you’re able to take the time to move into responsive mode, you’re also more able to see your way toward that balanced style. You won’t make as many mistakes around deciding what is really an issue of safety or morality that requires your close attendance (staying close in the parking lot, cheating on a test) and what’s not (sibling nastiness, forgotten homework). You’ll be able to be loving even when you’re also angry and disappointed. You’ll think through what should come next, and you’ll be able to be happier with your own actions (although your child might not be).
Connect, Teach, Enforce, Repeat
Parents tend to be happier around discipline, even during the most difficult moments, when we have a sense that it’s working. We feel more effective as parents if we can reassure ourselves, for example, that breaking the rules of our house has consequences. Ask a bunch of us for discipline advice, and one of the most common answers is some version of this: never threaten a consequence you won’t carry out. We put a lot of weight on that word and concept—“consequences”—but what exactly do we mean by it?
The American Academy of Pediatrics says that effective discipline includes three things: (1) a generally positive and supportive relationship between parent and child; (2) a way to teach the child the right thing to do in any given situation; and (3) a plan for ending the behaviors you don’t want. It’s that third piece—the 10 percent of the iceberg, to go back to my earlier analogy—that gives us the most trouble, both because we don’t like it and, often, because we feel that we don’t know how to do it.
In some cases, we can let “natural consequences” run their course—the child who throws her cookie now has none—but with many of the expectations we set for our children, the natural consequences of their behavior are either distant or more painful for the adults than for the kids. Especially when our children are young, many of the behaviors we want to end are fun from their perspective—chasing the cat, spitting water out of a straw at a restaurant. We tell them to stop, and they don’t. What then?
That point is, says author Joanna Faber, when many of us turn to “the threats, the warnings, the commands,” it sounds to small children “like a Charlie Brown parent talking: wah wah wah womp wah.” If we follow it up with a punishment—“That’s it, then. You won’t stop, so no television for you tonight!”—we put ourselves and our child on opposite sides, with her attention now on herself and what you’re doing to her rather than on the behavior you were hoping to teach. For many of us, that’s not a happy place to be, especially if it leads, as it often does, to a meltdown.
Faber’s suggestion? Try to engage and connect the moment things start to go south. It’s fun to chase the kitty or squirt the water, but here’s why it’s not fun for the kitty or the other diners. “Scolding, smacking, or putting a child in a time-out might stop him in the moment,” she said, “but you’re not here just to stop him in the moment.” You’re here, she says, to teach your child to make the right choices for himself, so offer that option first, even if it seems as if he should know better by now. Some things take a lot of saying.
If he still can’t make that choice, make it for him: “It’s too tempting for you to chase the cat right now, so I’m going to shut her in my room.” “It’s too hard for you to resist that straw, so we’re going to give it back to the waitress.” “I know I said we were going out to lunch after the game, but I don’t want to do that anymore, so we’re leaving.”
The consequences, she says, “can look much the same” as any punishment you might have imposed, but using words that show that you understand your child’s feelings, and that express yours, can make it easier to keep yourself calm and to allow the child a chance to apologize and make amends (even as you still remove the cat or the straw, or leave the restaurant). You may not achieve calm. You may not get a “sorry.” You may, instead, meet with grumbling and complaining or shrieking and wailing, and all may not end happily. That’s okay. They’re hearing you. They’re gradually connecting their behavior to your response. It’s all part of the process, and you’re all but guaranteed to get another chance.
That whole sequence of connecting, teaching, and then, if necessary, ending a behavior is one you will repeat again and again, especially with a younger child, so make your words positive ones, even if the behavior is anything but. “If I’m going to say it a hundred times,” says Faber, “I figure it might as well be something I want my child to learn.” Thus “Pat the kitty gently,” not “Bad boy! Don’t chase the kitty!” We want to teach our children, not give them labels to live down to, which means that repeating “Please put your bowl in the dishwasher” in various ways thousands of times over the course of a childhood is better than “You are such a slob,” no matter how tempting the latter may be.
That kind of repetition is where a lot of us fall down. Consistency is hard, and it’s especially difficult when we’ve become so accustomed to an on-demand world. When I run out of my preferred brand of coffee, I open an app on my phone, and in two clicks six more cans of French Market Coffee & Chicory, Restaurant Blend, are on their way. Why, then, do I have to tell you to put your cereal bowl in the dishwasher six times and then tell you I’m taking a dollar off of your allowance if you don’t do it before you will comply? And why did you not take the spoon? And why—why—will we have this exact same conversation tomorrow?
Because that is the way this works, and the sooner we embrace that, the sooner we can get back to being generally happy in spite of it.
Most parents, says Bryson, “expect too much. Just because a kid can do something well, like control anger and handle disappointment, doesn’t mean he can do it all the time.” Those seeming setbacks can really set us off. When we feel that our kids have let us down, says Bryson, it triggers our parental fear that this is about our child’s character, “when in fact, it’s typically about a skill or an ability they don’t fully have wired yet because their brain is still building.”
When we accept discipline as a long-term teaching process, it gets easier. Instead of thinking, I’ve asked him hundreds of times to do this and he still doesn’t do it, parents who are happier in their disciplinary role think something more along the lines of I’ve asked him a hundred times and I’ll ask him a hundred more and that’s how we get there.
“My oldest is eighteen,” says Ylonda Gault Caviness, “and seriously, it wasn’t until days before she turned eighteen that I was beginning to see that, oh, she heard me.” Suddenly, her daughter was getting ready on time or putting in a load of laundry. “There were so many things that I thought, okay, I gotta just write this off, I’ve said it a million times, it’s not going to happen.” And then it did.
As Catherine Pearlman, a parenting coach and the author of Ignore It!: How Selectively Looking the Other Way Can Decrease Behavioral Problems and Increase Parenting Satisfaction, says, try not to let the crying and the complaining and the shouts of hatred bother you. “That’s how you know it’s working.”
Maybe You Don’t Have to Do Anything
As kids get older, the natural consequences of their actions are more likely to really bite them where it hurts. Even when it’s not as serious as an arrest or expulsion, the results of something like being late for a team practice, rude to a teacher, or not turning in homework assignments can be enough to allow a parent to do nothing but sympathetically make sure the connection hits home. You are, of course, sorry that your child lost her place on the starting lineup, wasn’t chosen among her classmates as a school ambassador, or lost the chance to move up to the honors English class. But no, you’re not going to try to make it right, although you are willing to help her think of ideas to help herself.
With younger children, a different kind of “not doing anything” can be a genuine discipline strategy, and even a very effective one, if you can swing it. Most of us are familiar with the idea that rewarding a behavior you don’t want with attention only reinforces it. (I hit my sister and now look! Daddy is sitting in my room talking to only me!) For many minor things, like tantrums over the end of screen time or whining about chores, the best thing to do is to do something else. If you get good at it, this is a strategy that can really up your happiness. If you see something, don’t always say something. Sometimes, your kids are just being annoying, and it’s possible to choose not to be annoyed.
Pearlman lays out a clear map for how this works. When we talked, she used a child’s mild temper tantrum as an example. “Start by ignoring it,” she told me. “Flip through a catalog on the counter. Put all your attention on that catalog, even if it’s really hard. At the same time, you’re listening, because you’re going to reengage as soon as it stops—about something else. You’re just going to go on as though there was no tantrum or whining or whatever.” Later, she says, you “repair” if necessary—talk about other things to do when a child is upset, apologize if you wish you’d done something differently in the moments leading up to the tantrum, or invite an apology if your child’s behavior was particularly egregious—but often, you just move on (particularly from something like whining about chores).
There are also times when a child is doing something you feel as if you should stop, like making a repeated noise to annoy a sibling, hopping on one foot in a circle around the kitchen, opening and closing a cabinet door again and again and again, or indulging a harmless habit like leg jiggling or hair twirling. You really can let a lot of this go. “Just because a kid is doing something doesn’t mean you have to address it,” said Pearlman.
This might be difficult at first, but as you get used to it, it will increase your own happiness enormously. I don’t need to do anything about that, I say to myself as the child assigned to feed the dogs slams the bowls angrily on the counter. I can just let that go. The chore needs to be done, the screen time needs to be over, it’s time for bed, etc. That I’ve got. The rest is just static.
Little Kids, Little Problems. Big Kids . . .
The core of discipline isn’t the enforcement of rules, but teaching a child to absorb, embrace, and follow those rules on her own—to discipline herself. Discipline isn’t just meant to create a happier, more harmonious family life, or to engage a child’s help with the work of the household. It’s intended to teach the child how to be an adult in the world, where we will not be able to retrieve our stapler from a colleague by hitting her over the head with even the lightest of plastic desk toys, and where our partners will expect us to do our part in loading the dishwasher. We discipline to raise our successful thirty-five-year-olds, who can get places on time, hold down a job, and raise families of their own.
That requires that we back off from constant monitoring and enforcement of most things as our children get older (although you are allowed to repeat the request that they put their dishes in the dishwasher for as long as it takes). It starts small, with things like leaving them to pack their own bag for sports and school, and to handle the consequences of the lost or forgotten item. It expands as older children are left at home alone, trusted with Internet passwords, or asked to obey household rules when no one is watching. And when our children make mistakes with those minor challenges (as they will), experiencing your disappointment and losing their privilege or access gives them a taste of what screwing up feels like, and what it’s like to have to re-earn your trust and a chance to try again. Those things lay the foundation for the bigger challenges that come later, when you have a teenager at the wheel of a car, armed with a cell phone, her own hard-earned money, and the ability to do just about anything any adult could do in that moment, including a whole lot of things that are against your family rules and even against the law.
You’re counting on the accumulation of all those years of teaching, both generalized (in our family, we are honest with one another, we respect the property of others) and specific (we do not send naked pictures of ourselves or others over mobile networks, we do not drink until we are old enough to do so legally) to help her stay safe and stay on the right path.
Sometimes she won’t, no matter how hard you’ve tried to get this “right.” And you won’t even always know about it—in one relatively small study, 82 percent of high school and young college students said they had lied to their parents at some point during the past year about friends, money, parties, alcohol/drug use, dates/dating, or sexual behavior—exactly the areas where we worry about our children getting in over their heads. That’s a scary statistic, especially when you think about the mountain of risky behavior their lies covered up.
One big irony here, again, is that as our children get older, “natural consequences” really set in, and that’s exactly what we are afraid of. The potential natural consequences of drinking and driving or unprotected sex can be life-changing. The natural consequences of smaller failures in the school and activities arena also have real-world implications. Often, we’re threatening our own “big” consequences in the hopes of helping to scare our children away from the even bigger consequences we can’t control.
At the same time, the stakes feel higher for us as parents. These are our teenagers, not our forgiving toddlers. They can carry a grudge, hurt our feelings, and physically walk out of our doors. It can be hard to discipline them. Canise Herald, an Indiana mother of a fourteen-year-old, treasures her good relationship with her daughter, and says she’s often easier on her than she thinks her own parents might have been. “You don’t like making your kid mad at you.” When her daughter was caught using her mobile phone in a way the family had forbidden, she lost the phone for a period, but otherwise “got off easy,” in part because Herald and her husband just can’t stay mad at their daughter for very long. Lightening up can feel like the most loving choice.
But when your daughter is arrested for underage drinking, or your son is caught cheating on a test, in the last months or years before you expect to send them off to college to handle so much of life entirely on their own, you will be angry, and shocked, and worried. How will you get them through the consequences the world is about to impose? What can you do to convey your own disappointment and your lack of tolerance for what’s happened? And how can you trust them when, in such a short time, you watch them head out on their own?
What you do next, says Dr. Ginsburg, is exactly what you’d do with a younger child who’d seriously broken your house rules. The only difference is that you have less time in which to see if it’s worked.
“One of the consequences of blowing it in a big way is that your child loses your trust,” he says, and that loss of trust has its own consequences. Your child may lose your permission to use the car or the family wireless network. She may need to return to telling you, in detail, exactly where she is, and when she’s moving, and accept that you will be checking up on her in ways you were not in the past.
With a younger child, you can take as much time as you need to restore the privileges that are taken away after a major incident—for example, at our house, more than $200 in in-app purchases made when a child was given too-early access to the family account. You can talk about what happened, why the child was tempted, how he came to make the wrong decision, how he felt afterward, and how to keep it from happening again. You can talk about the restored trust at each step (the return of the screen privileges, access to the device without supervision, and eventually access to a new password).
With an older child, you may have to restore privileges more quickly, so that you can once again assess whether that child will be ready to take care of herself in a college environment. The same conversations should happen, but in a shorter time frame, because both of you need to see that your child is capable of doing better before she heads out on her own.
As for the external consequences—the real-world results of an arrest, or cheating, or a very large bill for some very virtual goods—Dr. Ginsburg says it’s a parent’s role to support a child through those consequences, to help her advocate for herself, to do all you can to mitigate any long-term or even permanent impact, but not to absorb them or find a way to make them go away.
It’s likely you won’t feel very happy when your child makes what feels like a massive mistake. You’ll feel its weight on you; you will be disappointed in your child and for your child. It will be difficult to be happy even though your child is not. But you can return to the basics. You and your child and the rest of your family are safe and secure. You can, again, lift your gaze to the horizon and see the bigger picture. At some point, life lessons start coming from life itself.
A mother in Delaware who says her daughter made more than one suicide attempt in her early teens (the result of depression and a neurological condition) describes how the experience changed her perspective on discipline. “You have to really think about what is important to fight about when you have somebody in that situation,” she says. For some children, the consequences the real world provides are more than enough to raise anxiety levels and can be overwhelming. When parents pile on, fragile kids can shut down. This mother chooses to focus on being supportive at home for both that child, her oldest, and a younger sibling. “They know,” she says, “‘If I didn’t do my homework I’m not going to get yelled at by Mom; I’m going to get a bad grade and that’s going to affect me.’ Their actions are up to them.”
If you’re worried that your child is made overly anxious by the combination of parental and external pressure, you may need professional help to strike the right discipline balance—because no matter how off-balance things seem, lowering expectations to zero is almost never the right answer. Your message to your child—your future adult child—should always be “I know you can do this, and I will help you get to the point where you know it, too.”
Rules for Parents
For me, it often helps to have a go-to when I’m feeling challenged by a moment that seems to need a disciplinary reaction from me. I need a reminder or a mantra of sorts that I can pop up when I’m at a loss. Here are a few of the things I say to myself when I need to respond not react, impose a consequence, or repeat myself again and again.
Don’t engage. My daughters would be the first to tell you that they’re an emotional pair. Even my sons can go in for the occasional rant. When there is a child stomping around my house, angry, frustrated, and letting it all out (often with a bonus “I hate you!” for good measure), I remind myself not to engage. You don’t have to go in there. That’s her mood, his problem, her time to vent. Sometimes there’s even a good reason for it. That doesn’t mean I have to join it.
Don’t hold a grudge. This is really, really difficult for me. I can nurse a grievance for days, especially a real one, and who wouldn’t be angered by a child who has a tantrum after winning a hockey tournament? Or who ignores the request to take the Starbucks cup out of the car door, with the result that when the door is slammed, it spills everywhere, causing the car to smell of vanilla steamer for the next three months? Those things make me feel justifiably angry. It’s hard for me to remember that I have to be not just the grown-up, but the parent: the one who lets you make mistakes, loves you anyway, and doesn’t keep rubbing it in.
Don’t yell . . . back. Sometimes I yell at my children. I am a yeller. I grew up in a house of yellers. If I walk in on a situation that seems to me to require yelling, if I get a note from a teacher that demands my fast and furious response, I will find you, and I will yell at you. I’m working on it—I’ve learned that yelling doesn’t make me happier, either. I haven’t quite reached the no-yelling-at-all stage of personal Zen. But this I can do: If you yell at me, I almost never yell back. If I am angry, and I yell, that tells you how serious things are. It gets children moving. But if a child is yelling, and I yell back, then that child just dragged me into her drama. That never makes me happy.
Don’t second-guess. Once the heat of the moment has passed, it can be tempting to ease up on a longer punishment (like two weeks without a phone). This is a very bad idea. If you’re imposing a consequence, choose it carefully and stick with it. Holding firm the first few times means less begging later, and it’s easier on you, too. Decide what you want to do, then do it.
Don’t push them away. This, too, is about not holding a grudge. If anything, once something has gone really wrong, you want to bring your child closer. This is hard. As much as we try not to take our children’s failures personally, we’re often angry and disappointed when they mess up. It’s natural not to want to be close to them for a while (and sometimes necessary when we need to cool off).
But once we’ve put things back into perspective, it’s important to reconnect. Grounding has a big advantage beyond being painful—it gets the child home and under your wing. (Although at times, you find you’ve effectively grounded yourself, too.) One parent found at the end of her son’s junior year in high school that not only had he not done any of his math work for the entire semester, but that he was planning to try to smuggle marijuana back from a long-planned summer trip with a friend’s family. She canceled the trip, made him a place next to her desk, and had him work through the whole semester’s math, all summer long, right under her eye. Once they got past the first part, it changed their relationship, and the son credits it with turning him into someone capable of going to college.
It’s okay to enjoy it. If you must punish your children, you might as well see the funny side of it, especially when they’re young. When I grounded one of my children for the first time, I regretted the things she was missing almost as much as she did. Three years later, when I grounded her younger brother, I was so able to squash those feelings that I called up a close friend, the mother of his best friend, and asked her to please invite my child for a sleepover to which he would not be allowed to come. “I want him to feel it,” I said. He did. And I did the same for her a few weeks later.
Get working, side by side. After the smoke has died down, and things are on their way back to normal (or the modified normal that is your punishment), get that child and get to work. Tackle something. Prepare the garden. Clean out a section of the basement. Make brownies. Mend some metaphorical fences. This is not a punishment, but a way to dig back in and ground yourselves in the kind of work that puts us on the same team. Uniting your efforts toward a common goal can restore the balance in your family, and remind you and your child that you’re in this together. “Kids absolutely want to do the right thing,” says Dr. Ginsburg, as we wrap up our conversation. “They look to us to show them and tell them what’s safe and what’s right.” They want, and need, our guidance as well as our love and support, when things are going well and when things are going wrong. It’s all “discipline” and it can—it really can—make you all happier.