The irony of caring about a child's safety

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Let's look at an ever-so-common situation. A child is playing with a ball in the front yard. At one point, the ball bounces off a tree, and goes flying onto the street. The child goes running after the ball, steps off the curb, runs between parked cars, and catches the ball. He is about to start walking back, happily smiling that he managed to catch the ball, until...

...his mother steps the front porch, and sees him on the street alone. She runs toward him, grabs him by the hand, drags him into the house. Once inside, she starts yelling: "DIDN'T I TELL YOU NEVER TO CROSS THE STREET ALONE!?" A punishment follows. The child sits in his room, feeling sad.

So how does punishing a child equal caring about his safety? This is how this child would think: "I was much safer while running after the ball than while having my mother punish me?" In this case, the child is right: taking a chance of running after the ball is much less "harmful" that being punished. Then how can someone care and punish at the same time?


P.S.: The genders in this example are completely arbitrary (I chose them by flipping a coin). I'm not singling anyone out.

i struggled with this when i was little~ you see, my parents never punished me...it didn't matter how bad i was. my friends told me that if your parent punished you, it was because they loved you~that they wanted you to grow up to be a good person.....i believed that, and so set out to try to get punished so that maybe i could feel like my parents really cared aobut me...........
as an adult, i realize that that line is a load of crap! parents punish so that their child can learn right from wrong~ in our house, i make sure that the kids understand why they're being punished......actually, even when i was in college and running an after-school program, i made sure the kids knew what it was they did wrong, and how they could make things better for the next time.

I think that they should give you some sort of offset to what we have lectured all your little lives about. I am sorry I don't agree with you. if you live in a place like i do )apartment complexes) you need for your child to understand this. i would take away his tv for the night, or he had to come back inside and play in his room. but its saftey that a child needs to understand. how would you feel if you hit this child? and the mother cried that she tried to teach her child for years not to do this? its my responsibilty to make sure that my child is safe.. also up until this year my son was not allowed to play outside alone. he is 9. to many strange people come and go out of an apartment complex and being that the college kids here tend to drive very fast. I never punished my son harshly unless he did something that was very dangerous. this i feel is something that a child needs to learn at an early age to control. this is one of the impulse control issues that I have worked on very hard with my son. Aspie1 do you have children? i can not imagine not letting your child know that what he did is very dangerous.

The rule here was to not go after a ball until we made sure the street was safe. Some rules are more important than others. However, that does not involve punishment but rewardsfor complying and working with the child to understand the importance and purpose behind the rule. However, one the rule is understood and the child CHOOSES to violate that rule than what is wrong with taking the ball away or making the kid come inside. What precluded the child in your example from calling for help to get the ball? And if that was not an option than they should't be allowed to play with one unless there is supervision. That helps the kid prioritize between which is more important - the rule or the ball. We don't have alot of nit-picky rules around here so I expect the few they have to be followed .

When we lived in an apartment complex we had strict ruled for my daughter regarding where she could ride her bike. She was not that old and the other kids she played with were about 7 to 9. It was a case where some of the parents let their kids ride all over the place and in the street (it was a huge complex). We made boundaries that were very clear and understood and of course went around with her make sure she understood. (By the way she was not the only one wiht these boundaries). However one day she went riding all over with these kids and so we didn't yell or anything, but took the bike away for a while. The funny thing though was one of the other moms was frustrted because her son (6 yrs old and the brother of one of the other girls) would take off on his bike out of the complex and across a busy street and did this over and over. She was so surprised when we took the bike away like the thought had not occured to her.

No, I don't. I still live at home, actually. Anyway, I was writing my example from a child's point of view; my own from the way I remember it, to be exact. Anyway, how would a child reconcile parents' love and being punished for being a kid (e.g. running after the ball)? I remember my parents actually telling me: "we're yelling at you because we care about you!" And all I can think is: "that's the biggest bulls**t I ever heard." But I didn't dare to speak out, since I knew worse punishment would follow for not acting like I believe it. I always thought, and still do, that parents punish their kids to get even with them for breaking a rule, and to put the kids back in their place.

IMO your parents missed the boat. If you had been punished for running out between two parked cars (we had a kid die like that in our neighborhood and I was nearly hit on my bike in a similar situation) then the punishment would have fit the rule-breaking.
In my case I caught it at home, and no, I didn't do it again. My parents also did not tell me "we are spanking you because we love you." I was punished for my transgression.
I did talk to my dad about it years later. He said that it was his goal to get me to adulthood alive. If I needed therapy to deal with childhood trauma, at least I was alive. An inner city approach, and not one I can totally agree with, but there you have it.
Some parents do punish a child to get back at that child. It's an inappropriate and immature thing to do, but some parents are not good parents, have never tried to be good parents, and have never had good role models to emulate.

I don't even really consider it "punishment" but consequences for breaking the rule - and the rule is the focus so the child HAS to be old enough to understand the rule. If you can't ride the bike properly than the bike goes in the shed (or whatever). There is no need for any dramatics or for any parent to be explaining the whys after the rules have been established. So, generally the problem is either one of rules not be defined clearly enough or too advanced for the child to comprehend or beyond their ability to control (like a tic or OCD type behavior). So in that regard the parent has to cooperate and be realistic about what their kid can do. And if they do not have any impulse control to run in the street than they have to be monitored or only play in certain designated areas where the ball could not go in the street (for the example). If you are consistent and clear the child should realize themselves that THEY are the ones breaking the rules and not the parents being mean.

And we did have a neighbor who was very weird with the rules and enforced them severely with no sense but to antagonize their kid. The girl used to play with my daughter and one time they were outside in front of her house along with her mom out there. I called for my daughter to come inside and she told me Christy was grounded for a week for being late. I thought that was odd because I jsut saw everyone out there but her Dad said she wasn't IN THE HOUSE so he grounded her a day for every minute she came in late. Both my husband and I thought that was really bizarre.