How to Effectively Discipline Children

This week's article summary is Spanking Is Bad, But Most Discipline Is Too.

The older I get, the more it seems to me that my parents parented me better than I parented my kids. 

In terms of discipline, my parents never spanked me and I can’t recall a time when they yelled and screamed at me. They tell me I was an easy child to raise, yet I wonder if it was their parenting style that helped make me an easy-going kid.

What you’ll see in the article below is that the single most important aspect of parenting is your relationship and communication with your child. 

I always knew my parents were the ultimate authorities but they gave me ample latitude to develop my individuality, and they trusted me to make good decisions. When I messed up, there was never a ‘Come to Jesus’ scene or an attempt to put me on a guilt trip. On occasions they provided unprompted lessons but were never preachy. I went to them for advice when needed yet for the most part I was empowered to control and dictate my own life.

While the article below is meant for parents, its applications are clear for the classroom too: a strong, trusting, honest relationship with your students precedes discipline.

Joe

 -----

A global study has found that spanking children is terrible for kids — and that harsh verbal discipline is, too. What gives?

Good communication is crucial to so many aspects of life. Learning how to effectively communicate with your kids in a calm, non-aggressive fashion, especially when they’ve done something wrong or non-agreeable, is vital for kids’ positive developmental outcomes.

Researchers are now suggesting that verbal discipline often doesn’t work the way parents may hope if parents are “loud and abrupt” when they talk to their children. AKA, yelling at your kid doesn’t work. 

A recent study examined different kinds of punishments related to kids’ behaviors in a sample of 216,000 families from 62 countries. The study looked at forms of violent discipline, such as spanking, and nonviolent discipline, including taking away privileges as well as verbal reasoning, i.e. telling kids what they did wrong. 

Research has continually shown that spanking leads to negative child outcomes, such as aggression and distraction, regardless of the context in which children are disciplined, including country, race and ethnicity, and neighborhood.

But, perhaps a bit more surprisingly, nonviolent punishment had mixed results. Some nonviolent punishment led to an increase in distraction and aggression, but could also an increase in prosocial behavior. Additionally, when parents employed verbal reasoning with their kids, it sometimes led to an increase in aggressive behavior, particularly if the parents used harsh and aggressive language. 

According to Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, “Positive discipline doesn’t always seem to have all that many positive benefits. It’s more likely that the long-term investments that parents make in children, such as spending time with them, letting them know they are loved and listening to them, have more positive effects than nonviolent discipline.”

Following this study, it would seem conventional discipline and its supposed efficacy are put into doubt. But how should parents discipline their kids going forward? Grogan-Kaylor suggests that parents find ways to make communication with their kids open and accessible, establish structure and figure out a way to remove kids’ privileges in an appropriate way that’s in line with their age and development. 

This study is a reminder that the tone and language parents take with their kids can be just as important as what parents actually say — and is extra encouragement for parents to stay calm even when kids may sometimes test their patience.