Child development

Irony: when a Deterrent Becomes a Punishment

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What a different world we would have if deterrents, one of the central tenets of punishment, actually worked like it was supposed to. But let’s face facts: they don’t, at least not often enough, not often enough that the damages of the punishments promised as deterrents aren’t hurting us all.

 

The amount of punishments we actually have to implement should tell us this. We have all, nearly every last one of us been punished as children, and millions are still being punished as adults, the correctional system is an ever growing industry. Perhaps many crimes are deterred, but enough to say that this is the best possible option for us? Is it working well enough?

 

This is an interesting question, “is it working well enough,” and the answer there would be dependent on some assumptions, the first of which, as always in this topic, must be our stance on Original Sin.

 

On one side of this doctrine, if we believe either the religious version, that Man is born with sin in his heart, or the evolutionist version, that Man is descended from beasts and must be civilized by force, then our view will be that a great deal of crime has been deterred, that left to our own we will be criminals. In this view, if we let up on the stick, crime will increase and civilization will collapse; in this view, without punitive restraint, the beast will rule.

 

On the other side of this doctrine, if we reject the idea that sin and crime are built into humanity and see people as basically good, at least like housecats, that is, good when food is plentiful, then we may look for other causes for crime, then we may need reasons why people commit crimes. No secret for anyone who knows me, or anyone who’s seen other posts of mine: this is the view I begin with. I am looking for reasons, I start with the idea that something, something in this life, in the here and now, is causing crime and violence. There certainly are genetic things, built in things on either side of the moral scale, but saying “the Devil made me do it” is not a reason that we shouldn’t analyze what we are doing in the here and now. To state it a slightly different way, declaring “that’s just the way it is” and refusing to look at our own activity, that is something like socio or psychopathy.

 

I am trying to deal with the deterrent aspect here, but this needs to be said. I’ve said it elsewhere in more detail, and please ask if this isn’t clear; this is an interactive media, after all: punishment damages us. The damages of abuse are clear and well documented, and the damages of corporal punishment are of all the same sort, also well documented; corporal punishment is rapidly moving to the wrong side of the law in much of the world. What isn’t so well documented, what I am trying to show, is one or both of two things, which have the same result.

 

  1. “Corporal” punishment is really the only kind there is. There can be no punishment in the world except that it is made to happen, physically, except that it is backed up with force. We are corporeal beings after all. We don’t generally volunteer for our punishments, they are imposed, against our will and this ultimately must be done by force, even if that means in a particular case it is through the threat and learned experience of force, that is, even if every single punishment doesn’t require physical force, a general program of punishment  does.

 

  1. Much of the damage of abuse, corporal punishment, and this fictional non-corporal punishment isn’t physical. It is emotional, cognitive, psychological, and it stands to reason that it isn’t the physical aspects of abuse and punishment that cause it. The damage a young child suffers when its parent hurts it somehow on purpose and then promises to do it again, this doesn’t require that the hurt be only physical. This is the damage of emotional betrayal (among other things).

 

Damaged people are more subject to all sorts of social problems, crime being one of them, and being a part of many of these damages, addictions, self harm, promiscuity, violence. It seems to me, genetic or not, at least some of this is crime we are causing with our damaging, punishing ways.

 

But back to deterrents:

 

The first thing I would point out regarding deterrents are that their power increases as the certainty of their implementation increases, and of course that equation works also in the inverse. The power of a deterrent is lessened as the perceived chance of actually having to face the penalty grows smaller, meaning, if there’s a perceived chance the misbehaver can avoid the penalty, the deterrent can fail; this is only more true if the chance is real – and of course, many crimes and misbehaviours are not found out. Of course then, in anything but a totalitarian, police state, deterrents can and do fail, and damaging punishments ensue. If deterrents worked well enough, the prisons would not be so full, and we would not all be punished as children.

 

We offer these punishments in our effort to turn our kids and our adolescents away from misbehaviours and turn our adolescents and adults away from crime, and when it works, terrific, it’s all good. But when it doesn’t work, when our kids insist on their misbehaviours, or when our criminals do and we have to implement the punishment – well then we are damaging our kids, and further damaging these adult misbehavers, and we have made the shift from being the solution and trying to prevent crime and bad behaviour to being the problem, and actually causing it.

 

Defined as a joke with the power to make us cry, this is irony, a logical joke, but a sad, sad reality, the deeply ironic fallacy of deterrents.

 

If we believe in deterrents, but see crime remains, or increases, we may think the deterrents need to be stepped up, the penalties intended as deterrents worsened . . . and this probably only increases the damage, and doubles the horrible irony of our public policy. This is what is offered by our Law-and-Order politicians, more damage, more crime. (I’m looking at you, Stephen Harper.) That situation is of course only even more heartbreaking if we do that with our parental discipline, if we increase the stakes.

 

If this is not heartbreaking to us, we can consider that we have been desensitized to it. There is only so much horrible irony a person can take before we just switch off.

 

So, if my side of this argument is true, even partly, then punishment and deterrents, the very processes we hope will lessen crime and misbehaviours, could well be ironically creating the crime we are trying to stop. It’s also true that we have given these ideas a fair try – all of human history – and despite that things don’t change much, and that any lessening of the violence and brutality in this world has been accomplished by a net increase in humanity rather than an increase in penalties and deterrence schemes, we keep trying it. It’s well known that cognitive impairment is one of the many damages incurred by abuse and punishment. Perhaps this explains our inability to see this conundrum: perhaps we are slow learners.

 

 

A Revolution in Nature VS Nurture, Part Two

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

Here’s a page with info about the first and most famous of the twin studies:

 http://www.intropsych.com/ch11_personality/bouchards_twin_research.html

 So with this idea, that it takes genetics AND environment to produce an organism, and with the strong results that have been famously reported from the twin studies, I infer that the environments in the disparate homes these twins were adopted out to must be in fact far more similar than they are different from one another. What I am setting this up against is some of the ideas I have encountered during my time blogging and having online discussions about parenting, ideas like:

–         Some people nowadays let their kids do whatever they want

–         People don’t hit their kids anymore

–         The problems with kids nowadays are because they aren’t taught respect

It’s a pretty short list, I guess, but these ideas come in many forms. Of course, anyone who’s seen my stuff before knows where I’m at on this subject – spoiler alert! I don’t think kids should ever be punished, for anything – but the point I’m after here is a little different. The point I’m after is that many “normally” authoritative parents seem to believe that there is some large group of parents out there who aren’t fulfilling their responsibilities to civilize their children, that there is some sizeable group of people who don’t discipline their kids, parents who do not offer some reinforcement intended to teach their kids respect, and right from wrong – and that this idea is for the most part untrue.

It’s not my idea – these parents attribute some power to environmental influences, they assume that the presence or absence of discipline (punishment) to be an important environmental difference, and they intuit that this difference is what makes the difference in the success of their parenting and of their children. But is it true?

I don’t think it is, and this idea of the twin studies showing that environments differ very little, at least in a meaningful way, from household to household would support that conclusion. It would tend to suggest that at least in the adoptive households of these separated twins, either there weren’t these differences of punishing or not, or that the difference is not a meaningful one.

Certainly there is one common thing among the households: they all qualified as suitable for adoption families, either in the eyes of the government, or the private agencies, or both. Do we think they had to show they would provide discipline, or that they wouldn’t? That may be a real question, but it’s unlikely that many, if any of these households would have been the type that wouldn’t, because few households are. OK, that, by itself, is circular reasoning. But there are other reasons why I say that there really is no large group of people (at least in Canada and the States) who don’t use punishment as a way to rear their children.

The article linked below states that something like 80% of families in a study that recorded their family households were recorded using corporal punishment methods – perhaps a surprise for those who haven’t raised kids yet, that so many resort to it – and these were families that knew they were being recorded.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/28/would-you-record-yourself-spanking-your-kids/

 One can only assume that some number of these families had some measure of care to change their ways while the microphones were active, so this study has it that something upwards of 80% of people today are still using corporal punishment. The exact percentage is a matter for speculation – and so to start us off down the path of unfounded speculation, allow me!

First, if you will grant the first part of my premise, which is that many parents seem to think that there must be many families where people are not providing enough discipline, then the next question may be, does something less than 20% of families satisfy their theory? Does that fraction of the population explain “what is wrong with kids nowadays?”

Second, my previously posted theories as to why corporal punishment is still so prevalent, in the shortest form I can manage. A somewhat less abridged form is in this post here:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/04/16/my-doctrine-abuse-with-an-excuse/

  – nothing else “works.” Many parents want to raise their kids without spankings etc., but few are aware of or willing to change their expectations. We mostly haven’t thought it through, and before we work through it, the spanking has begun. Unfortunately, it appears to “work,” and many parents abandon their non-spanking dream.

 – even the parenting gurus, the sellers of popular books and radio broadcasts do not help these parents. They teach non-violent means but they don’t help parents with their expectations, and the parents are left to their own devices when a child insists on his misbehaviour. They reinforce the idea that everything should go the parents’ way.

So this is my thesis:

Nearly everyone uses punishment – we are all the same, there are no “different environments” among families within our culture. This aspect of the children’s lives are all pretty much the same, and so another explanation must be allowed for what is wrong with the world and “kids nowadays.” The idea that there are many people out there, a meaningful percentage of parents not disciplining their children and “teaching them respect’ and “right from wrong” is a myth, even if it’s an unconscious one. We need to look elsewhere for an explanation of why kids don’t listen to their parents.

A Revolution in Nature VS Nurture, Part One

Jeff/neighsayer5 Comments

It has come to be understood that without some form of Nurture there can be no Nature; that an organism’s genetic coding develops in interaction with the environment, and there is no “normal” or neutral environment. Eliminate the environment and you have eliminated the organism. Of course, all living things have both influences, and they are deeply enmeshed.

With this in mind, I would like to re-visit the seemingly astounding things unearthed in the many twin studies, separated twins, adopted out to different families, and tested later in life for personality traits etc. In short – very short, I admit – these studies famously showed that twins are twins, especially monozygotic twins, even when raised apart in separate families, separate towns, separate states, even sometimes in separate countries, many shared traits to an impressive degree.

(Some, and not a small number of people, have used the apparent triumph of the Nature over Nurture argument that the twin studies seemed to assure to justify some unpopular ideas of social Darwinism and the like. Personally, I too thought the results of these studies appeared to hurt the cause of those people invested in the Nurture side, myself included – although for me it’s a hobby, a train of thought, and not my livelihood. I confess to have been searching for a way out of that disillusionment, mostly from an intuitive thing, a sense that if Nature and our genes rule all, then there seems no point to life, to thought, to the choices we make. Life in that world seems mechanical and rather pointless. But a new – at least to me – insight seems to have the power to save my hurt feelings in the matter. I hope to provide some reason and logic; I hope I am doing more than asking that anyone simply share my feelings about it.)

In terms of evolution, it would be basic to say that over the long term, environment, and living things’ responses to it, have shaped our genetic makeup, and for a few decades now, genetic science is showing that this is also true in the short term, that during the development of a single organism, environment is in interaction with genes, activating and making dormant different genes. In other words, it seems that it takes a creature’s genes and the creature’s environment to produce an adult, developed creature of a particular, identifiable phenotype. I’m sure I’m not saying anything intelligible there, but the point is simply this, that it takes both, genetics and environment to produce a creature that would seem to be within the parameters of what we might require to identify it. Too much genetic variance, it’s a different sort of creature, a different species. That we all know, but considering the interaction of genes and environment, we can also very possibly assert that if the environment were not also similar enough during the creature’s development, a different creature may also emerge, a different phenotype.

Now if that were true – and I have a blogger or two to run this past, people who know better and will no doubt try to correct me in ways I may still not understand – if that were true, then what might that mean about the twin studies?

It might mean that the genes these people share are not the only thing they share. It could very well mean that different families, in different towns, different states, even sometimes in different countries are actually similar enough environments to produce such strikingly similar phenotypes.

It could very well mean that the assumption of those who would interpret the results of the twin studies to support unpopular things like social Darwinism (and worse), the assumption that these separated twins were actually raised in meaningfully different environments – is false.

Here’s Part Two:

A Revolution in Nature VS Nurture, Part Two

Imagine a World Without the Damages of Abuse . . .

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The damages from abuse are many, but they’re becoming well known. I’ve often listed the categories of them, physical, psychological, emotional and cognitive, but the damages themselves are:

Impaired cognitive development (trouble in school, poorer grades);

Behaviour problems;

All manner of disorders: eating, depression, anxiety, self-harm, addictions;

Physical injuries, sometimes permanent and/or resulting in impaired physical development;

Etc., etc.

 

The thing is, the list of damages that have been so well documented as resulting from what is called corporal punishment – that is the same list. This is why corporal punishment is fast being outlawed all over the world.

 

All punishment is corporal punishment – that’s the big secret. Therefore the list of damages that result from all punishment is the same list.

Much abuse is punishment gone too far, and even those who promote punishment will agree that punishing means the administration of abuse (in the generic sense) for a good reason. Now . . .

Imagine a world without it.

A world without these damages, or with less of this damage? Now that is a world that would be something to see, wouldn’t it? Just ponder:

People with less cognitive impairment, fewer disordered people, less addiction . . . less damage of so many sorts. Healthier people, healthier psyches, who knows? Maybe people would even be smarter.

Just imagine it.

Love Flowing Backwards

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

It’s a sad thing, but a vicious cycle, and a real one, in many families: reverse flow.

In some families, and to some degree or other in many families, sad to say, it is the children who sacrifice, the children that spend their days protecting the adults from their bad feelings, making sure the adults feel loved.

Adults know how important it is for children that they feel loved. Unfortunately, for so many, that is not always the priority for parents and caregivers, too often the priority seems to be discipline first, and love second. For children, however, for that very reason, that choice is not available, they are not able to exercise that sort of prioritization.

When an adult requires a child’s love, that child had better just give it up. An adult in the throes of feeling unloved, and adult who is experiencing their infantile lack of love is a dangerous thing to a child. A child in this situation has no choice. This child must set aside his own needs and serve the adult’s needs; this is a matter of self-preservation, and the child, almost invariably will look after his life first, and search for love later.

Unfortunately, what often happens is this search for love later in life becomes a desire to have children and continue this backward cycle.

(As a half-humourous aside, I must observe that in the world I am hoping to help create, saying “I want a child” will begin to be seen as a form of “I want a human being,” alongside of horrible phrases like “I want a Negro,” or “I want a pair of Vietnamese nymphets.” These are human beings, not possessions of some sort. It should be seen as a horrible thing to say, and it should be obvious that saying it signals an unhealthy psychological need as much – and more importantly – as it does a natural manifestation of the procreative urge.)

I’ve said it before, and I know I’ll be saying it again:

This generation needs to lose at both ends. We may not have gotten the unconditional love we needed as children, but we need to break the cycle. We need to not get that love again, we need to not suck it out of our children. That doesn’t save us anyway, it only continues the cycle, it only hurts our children, and theirs, and theirs, ad infinitum.

The buck should stop here. Let’s be the last unloved generation.

Don’t Turn Your Back on your Childhood Self

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When I was a kid, and still pretty young, I realized my parents were crazy.

There was a moment that I remember, although I’m sure it’s not an isolated incident. We were in the car, going somewhere or coming back, all of us, me and my brother, my two sisters, and my parents, in the big family car, Mom and Dad in the front, kids in the back, either the Meteor or the Parisienne. This would have been in the mid to late 1960s.

My brother was hyper as Hell, he could get on your nerves, and had gotten on Dad’s. He’d gone too far; he knew he was in for it, and so he got scared and started crying. This was at least partly from real fear, maybe partly a ploy, something kids do to try to tell a parent that they’ve made their point, but he was really crying. Dad apparently found this noise to be not any less irritating than my brother’s preceding noise, and growled (perhaps you’ve heard this one before?)

“Stop crying, or by God, I’ll give you something to cry about!”

To my mind at the time, the child, my older brother by a year and a half, was already crying from fear, and my father’s solution was simply more fear. This seemed unreasonable to me; I was crying also, and I too was only more afraid and only cried harder after that. That may not have been the only time, but it’s the one I remember the most, and I decided in that moment that grownups were crazy.

The difference between me and most people, between me and you, is that I’ve never changed my mind about it. To reverse myself about that is, definitively, to become crazy. To join the ranks of the mad, and I’m not doing it. My eyes were clear in that moment.

Now, I know you’ve all been there too as kids. I hope I can in some humble, respectful way, suggest that if you have changed your mind in that way, that you reconsider, retrace your steps, and start again. Support the sane, frightened child you once were and reject the madness that we call ‘parenting, discipline, punishment, consequences.’

Support the child you once were, and support the children in your world now.

And support me too! Follow me on Twitter. I will continue to try at least to put something out in this topic weekly.

My Doctrine: Abuse with an Excuse

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Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #1

 

A. Damages

1. Abuse in its several forms damages people. The forms are these: physical, mental (cognitive), emotional and psychological. The damages have the same forms. This is well documented.

2. Corporal punishment also damages people, and the damages take the same forms: physical, mental, cognitive, emotional and psychological. This is well documented. The corporal punishment of children is being outlawed in much of the world, driven by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child.

 

3. Non-corporal punishment cannot actually exist, it’s a logical fallacy – an oxymoron, in fact. The argument goes like this:

 

– punishments are unpleasantnesses, they are by definition, something the punished person would not want, and so they are necessarily imposed, forced upon the punished person, against his will. Anything forced, anything imposed, involves either direct physical means, or at least the threat of physical means.

– punishments are employed when reason and talk – non-physical methods – fail, or are presumed to fail. This is often true, that these non-physical means fail, babies and young toddlers can’t be reasoned with, and even for older children who can be, punishments are usually only considered when any child is being unreasonable in the first place. When non-physical methods have been attempted and then ruled out, then logically what remains is physical, either directly or in potential.

 

Therefore punishment is impossible except that it’s physical. The only possible exception to this logical proof is in the case of punishments that are purely mental, emotional, or psychological, and these sorts of punishments are also universally considered to be unacceptable and abusive.

 

When children submit to their non-corporal punishments, this is not a disproof. It is only that the child is making a choice, the child is either remembering his baby or toddlerhood punishments, the physical ones, or more likely the child knows that if he resists, that the punishments will escalate and become corporal punishments, or most likely both, some combination of the two.

 

4. Conclusion: there are no non-corporal punishments. All punishments require force and physicality. Therefore all punishment is corporal punishment, therefore all punishment cause the damages associated with corporal punishment.

 

Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #2

 

B. The Cognitive Damage

 

1. Punishments/penalties are all artificial consequences, contrived ones. It is not really a simple ‘cause and effect’ phenomenon when some active agent chooses the effect for a cause. In this way, our contrived consequences are substituted for the real world, natural consequences a child may experience when he explores or misbehaves, and therefore any real world learning experience is circumvented. This is the function that is in play when we note, through many good studies that corporal punishment hampers cognitive development.

 

When standardized punishments are substituted for the nearly infinite number of random real world consequences of childhood exploration as well as misdeeds, the vast and varied learning that may have happened is severely lessened, and the only learning that does happen is artificial and contrived. This is definitive of serious arrested cognitive development. It follows that the resulting impairment of thought will vary, of course with many factors, but certainly with the degree to which a child is controlled. A child who has more real world learning experience will be better able to process information regarding the real world than one whose learning years held few real world mistakes and learning opportunities.

 

2. Of course, parents need to protect their children from extreme danger. Life and limb certainly take priority over individual missed opportunities for real world learning. These safety hazards are not the most common situations parents and children face, however, and this is not a valid argument for the use of punishment generally.

 

Some may say that children need to be punished to learn to obey in every situation, so that their obedience will be guaranteed when there does arise a hazard, a real threat to life and limb, that a child needs to be conditioned to obey so that he may be ordered away from a street or a river and will comply immediately. This, I would say is a valid argument only if this sort of conditioning didn’t have a serious down-side. I believe that the damages that result from punishing, and certainly from the all-encompassing environment of punishment that this argument implies, brings a terrible cost also, up to and including a considerable cost of life and limb, in the form of violence, crime and suicide, along with the many social costs that are not as visible, that result from the cognitive hobbling that is produced by these methods.

 

Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #3

 

C. Childhood Misbehaviours are Irrelevant

 

1. When we are punishing our children to teach them not to cause any harm in our lives, not to break anything, not to hurt anyone, we are causing permanent harm in our attempts to avoid short term and material harm. The damages of abuse and corporal punishment are long lasting, while the damages of childhood misbehaviours are, for the most part, either material or temporary, sometimes both.

 

Temporary damages are bruises that result from infantile violence or carelessness, or simply missed or disrupted adult social occasions; material ones are broken dishes, damaged or stained clothing or furniture – of course material damages can be either permanent or temporary; a loved glass heirloom is forever, a coloured wall until the next painting. Things like painting the wall cost labour and money, which, if it happens to a modern person living in debt, may be a permanent harm to their finances. Young children can cause real harms, but again, as in the previous section, this would only justify the damages of punishment if those damages were small and temporary, and they are not. The damages of corporal punishment (and it is my position that there is no other kind) are long lasting and impact every aspect of life. This, again, is well documented.

 

2. Childhood explorations and mistakes, when they go bad, can cause some damage, things get broken, caregivers and other children get bruised and inconvenienced, but for the most part, these are individual, one-off incidents, that is, single incidents, with a single instance of damage per case. If we consider that each instance is a learning opportunity, each instance can teach a child a single lesson such as the fragility of pretty glass objects, or the fragility of human relationships (when one toddler hurts another, and the other expresses his feelings somehow), we can see that trading any one such lesson off against a lifetime of suffering the damage of having been punished is a bad bargain. The long term damages of punishment would only be justifiable by considering that the damages of the child’s misbehaviour are also long lasting. In reality, the occurrence of a misdeed or a mistake by a child will rarely be habit forming. These things, dish-breaking, punching other children, do not become chronic if they go un-punished. In reality, punishing increases defiance and misbehaviour in the long term.

Consequences, shmonsequences . . .

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Change your ways, people, not your words, or not only your words.

Consequences, discipline, ’cause and effect,’ these are all words for punishing. If you’re imposing any of these things, you’re punishing . . . and yes, that’s . . . bad.

I am the most politically correct person you’d care to meet, but here’s what’s wrong with so much about PC terms: they’re terms. Words. We have seen words banned, new words for old things, old words disappearing, but the things never seem to.  Outlawing the N-word has not ended some peoples’ dislike for black people, racism still exists, albeit in code.

Punishment still abounds, albeit in code. Changing things, though, that is more difficult than changing words. Changing this thing, the world-destroying scourge of punishing, this is going to be harder than memorizing new words for it. It’s going to involve some very heavy lifting, namely:

1. Admitting our parents hurt us to no good end; and

2. Never regaining our sense of personal power by hurting our kids to no good end.

That is some very heavy lifting. No shame in not doing it – just no glory either.

Fail at Controlling Your Kids

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

This is it, this is what I’m saying.

Not “control your kids without punishment,” or “control your kids without physical punishment.”

I’m not trying to tell anyone that is is possible to control your kids without punishment.

It’s not. I admit that.

What I’m saying is, punishment harms them – us. We were kids too – so controlling them harms them, so: give up the control. Control them a whole lot less.

Protect them from serious safety issues, but don’t punish them in order to train them to protect themselves from these serious safety issues, because this punishment harms them. When they’re small, too young to understand, that’s YOUR job, protecting them, not theirs.

Protect yourself and your expensive or otherwise treasured things from them when they’re small and experimenting with the world and with their power, creative and destructive power, but don’t punish them in order to train them to protect you and your stuff from their creative and destructive power, because this punishment harms them. When they’re small, too young to understand, that’s YOUR job, protecting you and your stuff, not theirs.

Other than that, don’t be controlling your kids, the cost is too high, the cost in trauma, the cost of their trust in you and your love, and the cost in their cognitive development.

You can TRY to control them, with speech, even distraction, don’t get me wrong, you’re supposed to teach them, you want them to know you’re paying attention, that you care. You can TRY to talk them out of stuff, talk is OK, but if it’s not working, it’s not working, don’t escalate to punishing. Let them learn the real-world consequences of their actions, let them learn about the real world.

Believe me, it won’t “work” most of the time. With no tool more powerful than talk, you are going to lose the battles with your two-year old.

And that is how it should be.

If you always win, if you do what it takes to win every time, if you succeed at controlling your kids, that’s only a short term win for you. Punished kids feel betrayed and abused. Punished kids, by the time they can converse, don’t like you any more, and they don’t want to listen.

If you want them to talk to you when they can, if you want teenagers that are willing to converse with you, keep it to talk when they’re small, never escalate.

Lose the battles.

Fail at controlling them.

Beware of parenting advice that tells you you can win, because winning with your two-year old means losing your older kids.

You want to win the war?

Lose the battles.

 

Negative Effects on Cognitive Development

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

I see rewards and punishments as very detrimental to learning about the real world. I think the kids’ minds are not properly developed by the adults always substituting artificial effects for real world effects that would have had an actual relationship to the cause.

Not every punishable situation is a safety, or a life and death matter.

They do say that over-punishing has the effect of some hampering of cognitive development, and I think this is why, because punishments and rewards interfere with actual, real life learning.

And if I’m right about that, then the increase of negative cognitive effects is linear, not only present in “over-punishing.”

Wouldn’t you think?

Also, punishment wouldn’t have to physical for that negative effect, would it? Any punishment that substitutes an artificial effect for a real cause would do that . . .