Parenting Blog

"Dr. Laura...How do I explain this kind of parenting to other parents who think I’m spoiling my child? They all use timeouts and other punishments.” -- Rebecca

The stakes are high in parenting.  When we're choosing to do things differently, it's easy to feel defensive.  And all of us wonder at times if we're on the right track.  Are really teaching our child to behave if we don't punish?  Might we even, heaven forbid, be spoiling our child?

The simple answer is that parenting without punishment raises great kids.  When we attend to the needs driving children's behavior and set limits with empathy, we're not only guiding immediate behavior, but nurturing long-term emotional intelligence. So we're raising children who are more able to manage their own emotions, and therefore their behavior.

Besides, "to spoil" means to damage or ruin something. We know that permissive parenting raises anxious, unhappy, self-centered kids -- what people often mean by the term "spoiled."  We know that authoritarian parenting raises kids who are more prone to anger and depression -- kids who have to recover from the damage done to them in childhood. 

This kind of long-view is hard to prove to critics when your children are small, because the proof will be in the pudding.  And there's no denying that punishment gets immediate compliance.  When humans are threatened with force, they usually comply, right?  And even a timeout is a threat of force, because if the child won’t go into timeout, you do have to use force to get them there.  Which is one of the problems with punishment -- we have to keep escalating our use of force.

Of course, we'd all like our children to just straighten up and do what they’re told.  But even adults have a hard time with that.  These are kids; their brains are still developing.  (In fact, the way we respond to their behavior actually shapes their brain development -- do we help them learn to calm or to escalate crises?) It's a big job for kids of all ages to learn to manage the emotions driving their behavior. 

So what makes us think that punishment -- spanking, consequences, timeout, yelling, withdrawal of love in all its many forms -- will make our children "act right?"  They may resolve to try, just like we resolve to diet. But they don't have the ability to manage the feelings driving their behavior unless we help them with those emotions. So they blow it, again.  We punish them, again. They decide that parts of themselves are just plain bad, and need to be disowned, hidden. But when we humans push parts of ourselves away, what happens?  They pop out at the worst times.  So the kid who tries to behave ends up losing his temper and socking his little brother, not even knowing how it happened. But we know how it happened. He felt disconnected from us, which threatened his very survival on a primal level.  He was full of tangled feelings that he didn’t know how to release or to manage. And instead of helping him, we punished him. Now we escalate our punishment. He decides he can’t please us. And he hardens his heart to us, which makes him more defiant, less likely to cooperate in the future. Punishment creates defiant children who are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, to drugs, and to peers (since they're looking for love in all the wrong places.)

So what can you tell those well meaning folks who think you’re spoiling your child? 

1. Of course you set limits on behavior, and you have high expectations -- but you do it with empathy instead of punishment because it helps your child internalize, or "own" those limits -- which is what develops self-discipline.

2. You pay as much attention to emotions as to behavior, because once kids can manage their emotions, they can manage their behavior.

3. Your relationship with your child is the most important thing in parenting, because kids only "behave" when they feel deeply connected to us.

Quite simply, you're parenting for emotional intelligence and longterm development.

Then tell them you'll be glad to compare notes on this experiment when your children, and theirs, are teenagers. Because you're looking forward to the teen years.  After all, kids raised with empathic limits are responsible, considerate, happy teens.  The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.