The Great Mom Debate: How Creative Are Your Punishments?
Using a cold shower as a discipline method will get you thrown in jail. Not disciplining your child at all will likely end with them thrown in jail. While there’s a whole lot of middle ground between these two extremes, experts are divided as to what constitutes an appropriate child punishment. It’s no wonder parents are confused!
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Once a wrong has been committed and it has been established that “This cutting of your brother’s flip-flops must never happen again”, we moms have to decide what happens next. Parents seem divided in two camps: the time-out arbiters and the creative disciplinarians. The former group is exactly what it sounds like—the offender goes to time out, usually for one minute per year of age (or until Mommy stops wanting to scream at him). While the latter group’s methods take more time and energy, they often prove way more entertaining.
For example, when my friend Tanya’s two boys fight, she gives them each a spray bottle and a rag before sitting them down on opposite corners of the living room. They have to get down on their hands and knees and clean the floor until they meet in the middle. Her floors are always sparkly clean! (How she avoids spray-bottle fights, I’m not sure.)
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There are also the moms who make the punishment fit the crime, like my friend Angie who, when her kids toilet-papered a neighbor’s house, made them go over the next day, pull all of it out of the trees, roll it up into balls, and then use it. For the longest time, we thought the baskets filled with wadded-up TP in her bathrooms were just her kooky decorating sense.
Last, there are the punishments designed to “Teach a Lesson”, like the other day when I found my 9-year-old playing a computer game where he got points for “torturing suspects” to make them talk. I made him read portions of the wikipedia entry on torture, write me a one-page paper on why hurting people is wrong, and then because the game used a “rack” I showed him a picture of the real deal and told him how it was used in the medieval era. That might have been overkill (no pun intended!) but I wanted him to understand that in no way is torture funny or suitable for a child’s game.
What’s your discipline style? Take our survey:
- Time out. It’s simple, predictable, and it works!
- I use a consequence-based approach.
- I’m creative! (And I’ll tell you how in the comments!)
- It depends. I use a little bit of everything.
Charlotte Hilton Andersen is a mom of 5 and the author of the book The Great Fitness Experiment: One Year of Trying Everything and the blog of the same name.
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