Is This A Valid Parenting Style?

Post Reply New Topic

I was talking to my brother; (3 children) and child rearing came up. He said what worked for him was that if the child acted up, he/she had to spank the parent (BTW he said they hated it and would go to any length to avoid having to do this) He said this method was effective for he and his wife and it demonstrated to his kids how hard it was to apply discipline. I have mixed feelings about this parenting style; what do you think?

Not gonna lie, I feel like that would be a worse punishment than just getting hit.

I've never heard anything like this before.

Developmentally that kind of makes sense for relatively young kids as they do tend to idolize the parents and will go to lengths to avoid disapproval. But, this is probably just a less harmful version of most other forms of punishment. They're giving the kids an extrinsic punishment where they should be on the path towards ones that rely more on an intrinsic sense of right or wrong.

And really, punishment rarely actually works. Discipline, as in educating the kid as to why the action was wrong, connecting them with the consequences of the action and giving them some alternative for use in the future does work over time. Although, the younger the kid is the less you can really expect that to work. Which is probably why in some cultures the kids get to do pretty much anything they like for the first few years.

This.

And thus it's far too rare for anyone to really comment on besides saying "Never heard of it."

How well behaved are the children?

I've seen some teachers use this kind of psychology (not spanking, of course - something like teacher detention) and the kids have been all for it.
It's not used as an actual punishment but as a deflection from the unwanted behaviour, because it's funny or weird to think of teachers doing detention, so the unwanted behaviour is diffused.
In this way it is effective.

I wouldn't go that far, developmental psychology can be relatively helpful in predicting that this will likely not work in the long run and probably have unexpected consequences to the kids. The extent to that and the specifics would be somewhat hard to nail down due to the fact that this does seem to be rare enough not to be studied and I'm too lazy to go to the library to look for literature about it.

Being an angry kid, I would have spanked my mom just from being frustrated

I beat the tar out of my mother during a trauma trigger / sensory meltdown clusterf**k.
I don't recommend it to anyone.

I've never forgiven myself.

This does not sound like actual real life parenting to me. It makes me think of something I'd might see in an Adult Swim cartoon.