Parents new to respectful parenting are often completely confused about what to do about their child’s unwanted behaviors if they don’t impose “consequences” when their child engages in activities they consider unacceptable.
Parents often feel skeptical that there are ways to engage a child’s cooperation without using punishments and adult-imposed consequences—or at least threatening those things! In this episode, Dr. Nanika Coor explains why parenting with punishment is unhelpful for influencing your child’s behaviors in the long term.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Our episode "10 ways to help your child cooperate without using punishments" may also be useful!
Have a parenting question? Email Dr. Coor at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com or leave a voicemail at 646-926-3243.
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Hey parents! You're listening to the Project Parenthood podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Nanika Coor—clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll introduce you to the same respectful parenting practices that I use to help parents repair and deepen connections with their children. You’ll get tips for cultivating more parental self-compassion, more cooperation from your kids, and more joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them.
In today’s episode, I’m talking about why using punishment to get your child to start or stop doing what you want them to do isn’t helpful. Stick around till the end to hear about how to start creating a democratic alliance with your child that doesn’t include punishment.
Parents new to respectful parenting are often completely confused about what to do about their child’s unwanted behaviors if they don’t impose “consequences” when their child engages in activities they consider unacceptable. Are they just supposed to let their child do whatever they want, whenever they want—rules be damned? That can’t be right. Right?
Well of course, that’s not a great idea. But when you’ve been raised in a culture where what you do is more important than what you feel or who you are, and where it’s perfectly legitimate for adult needs to outweigh child needs, and to wield power over those smaller and weaker than you are (in ways you’d never allow yourself to be treated by another adult, I might add), it doesn’t make a lot of sense not to dole out punishments. And make no mistake, spanking or otherwise causing a child physical pain aren’t the only strategies that fall under the umbrella of punishment. Time outs, taking away privileges, and assigning unpleasant tasks are simply sugar-coated terms for punishment.
So what is punishment, exactly?
Where parenting is concerned, it’s deliberately making something unpleasant happen to a child or preventing them from experiencing something pleasant, usually in the hopes that the child will learn a lesson which will in turn change their future behavior. And sometimes it’s just about an arbitrary sense of justice that demands that if a child does something bad, something bad needs to be done to them—they must be made to suffer. And somehow all of this will make the child a better person.
Adult-to-child punishment is a practice rooted in behaviorism—a branch of psychology that began in 1913. Behaviorism views all human behavior as reactions to environmental stimuli, and as such, only concerns itself with observable stimulus-response behaviors. Behaviorism initially disregarded and denied the existence of innate or inherited qualities a person may possess—let alone a person’s thoughts, or emotional and physiological states, as factors affecting a person’s behavior. As the movement developed, researchers acknowledged that internal mental events play a role, but concluded that studying what is observable was more productive. According to behaviorist B.F. Skinner’s research, if a behavior is followed by a pleasant consequence (a reward or reinforcer), it’s likely to be repeated. If a behavior is followed by an unpleasant consequence (a punishment), it’s less likely to be repeated.
In his book Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn reviews research on the use of punishment in parenting. He describes one study looking at mothers using punishments with their kindergarteners to stop various unwanted behaviors. The researchers found that punishment was counterproductive regardless of the behavior it was being used to target, and ineffective for long-term effects on the particular behavior it was being aimed at. Later studies of the use of punishment showed that parents who punished at home had kids who showed higher levels of that punishable behavior outside of the home. Kohn also describes research showing that corporal punishment—or causing physical pain as a form of discipline—increases aggression in children and teaches them that aggression is an acceptable way of solving problems.
Kohn points out that exercising your parental power by forcing kids to experience unpleasantness—even if it’s not of the physical pain variety, like passive aggression, withdrawing attention or affection, and humiliation—still can result in negative consequences for both parent and child alike.
Let’s look at some ways that using punishments can backfire.
Humans will generally resist control—either overtly or covertly. When a child feels controlled they can become enraged, which is only heightened by the fact that they’re powerless to do anything about it. They may direct their anger at you or at themselves, but either way, the relationship is damaged. With repeated experiences of this, your child begins to see you as their adversary rather than an ally who is on their team.
Corporal punishment teaches your child to use force to get their way, but even non-physical punishment models for kids that when you have a problem with someone, you solve it by using your power to make the other person so unhappy that they’re forced to submit. So now you’ve got an angry child who now knows just how to use their “might” to get what they want from other people. It also puts your child in a pickle: this person who says they love me also makes me suffer on occasion. You run the risk of your child internalizing and carrying into their adult lives a belief that causing people pain and suffering is part of what it means to love them. Or maybe the takeaway message is that love is conditional upon others doing what you want them to do.
Sure, it’s easy to wield your punitive power over a 2-year-old, but it gets harder as they get older. Your punishments have to start getting more and more punitive because they will continually lose their effectiveness over time. Once your power over them wanes entirely, and they just shrug off your threats of grounding them or withholding allowance because they decide that doing what they want to do to meet whatever needs they have is more important to them than whatever punishment you’ve threatened—what will you do then?
Punishment is only ever a short-term solution because it doesn’t eliminate behaviors. It simply suppresses them while punishment is unpleasant enough. Once your child no longer experiences it as unpleasant, or decides the unpleasantness is worth it to meet their need, or you’re not around to impose it—the behavior returns and you’re back at square one.
When the person your very young child is completely dependent upon for love, comfort, and safety—you—sometimes purposely tries to make them feel terrible, they lose trust in that love and safety. They stop seeing you as a caring ally and start seeing you as an adversary to either lock horns with or avoid. It would make no sense to express their true feelings to you or admit to a mistake if they know that on the other side of that transparency is feeling really bad about themselves, or you, or their relationship with you. It makes more sense to just hold you at arm’s length because that feels safer. And as a child reaches the teen years and is able to move around in the world independently, it’s much harder to keep a kid safe when they’re shutting you out because they don’t trust you enough to let you in.
When you send your child off to their room to “think about what they did wrong”, I can assure you—that’s not what they’re thinking about. They’re thinking about how unfair your punishment is, how they’re going to get back at you (or whatever sibling ratted them out), how they’re going to avoid punishment the next time (possibly by sneaking and lying), or how they’re a bad person unworthy of forgiveness or compassion.
A child who knows from experience that you will do something unpleasant to them after they shove a child on the playground won’t be thinking about how the crying child they shoved feels or how to make amends. They’re worried about what this now means for them. The more worried they are about how they’ll be punished, the less likely it is for them to develop moral understanding. Punishment cultivates self-interest and self-centeredness and leads them to assess situations through the lens of “What do my grown-ups want me to do and what will they do to me if I don’t?” Rather than, “What kind of person do I want to be in the world?”
Instead of trying to coerce and manipulate your child’s behavior through punishments and rewards, you can love your child unconditionally—even when their behavior is less than desirable. The trust, safety, and respect cultivated between you and your child when you do so give you influence with your child. They care about what you think. They’re willing to listen to, consider and often take in your opinions. They’re more willing to listen to reason and your explanations for how and why doing X rather than Y will affect them, you, or other people. The more you try to control your child with punishment, the less influence they will allow you to have in their lives as they get older.
If you want some alternatives to using punishment, i.e. how to “work with” your child instead of “do to” them, check out a previous episode I did called “10 Ways to Help Your Child Cooperate Without Using Punishments” which I’ll link to in the show notes.
For the next few weeks, practice being in a democratic and caring alliance with your child, where trust and respect flow in both directions.
The next time your child breaks a rule or engages in unwanted behavior, instead of using force or domination in the form of punishment, remind yourself that in a democratic relational system everyone has a voice, and everyone’s voice has to be listened to. You don’t have to agree with what you’re hearing, you just have to respect it. One way to express your unconditional acceptance of who your child is and how they do life is by validating their experience.
Instead of imposing a punishment, once you and your child are both calm and feel connected to one another, invite your child to tell you what was going on for them when they did the behavior you disapprove of.
Practice listening, observing, and describing what you’re hearing and seeing your child communicate without adding your own opinions and interpretations.
Then, clearly communicate that it’s understandable to you why they believe their opinions or chose those behaviors given the situation, their personality, their physiological state, and their past or current situation, or other factors you know about the context and who they are as a person.
Then brainstorm with them other acceptable ways they might get their needs met next time.
Test it out and report back!
The more you focus on compliance and obedience the more you’ll feel pulled to use bribes, threats, and punishments. But as we’ve discussed—that’s only going to get you temporary compliance at a significant cost to your relationship with your child. Plus, misbehavior that leads to punishment generally leads to a cycle of more misbehaviors that lead to a doubling down on punishments—and repeat.
For healthy development to take place, your child needs to have an internal sense that you love and accept them unconditionally for who they are rather than what they do. That happens in the context of your day-to-day relationship and how they experience you within that context.
When you take punishment off the table as an option for gaining cooperation from your child you’re committing to having the courage to parent with the relational long game in mind rather than take the easy route of immediate—if temporary—obedience.
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I hope that’s helpful! You can learn more about my work with parents at www.brooklynparenttherapy.com and on Instagram at BKPARENTS.
If you have more questions about alternatives to punishment or any other parenting questions or stories, leave me a message at (646) 926-3243, and be sure to let me know if it's okay to use your voice on the show. Or, send an email to parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to Project Parenthood on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next week!