Comfortable at the home of some nice people in Memphis, I was preparing to speak with a group about bad behavior, time outs and punishment.
Suddenly, happy play in the basement fell apart. A crash was followed by a crying 4-year-old, then a screaming father.
The mother scolded them all: “Can’t you be good-at least when he’s here,” she said.
The 7-year-old yelled, “You’re stupid. I’m not doing that. I don’t care.”
As mother and father loudly debated strictness and “No TV tonight,” they seemed to focus on controlling the 7-year-old and teaching the 4-year-old.
Embarrassed, the family-both parents and children-seemed to believe they had blown their cover. It was evident mother and father felt like bad parents who couldn’t manage or squelch bad children.
I had to tell them I had been through an almost identical scene at my own home the morning before. With a sigh, my hosts asked a wonderful question: “Why do our children have bad behavior?”
Our children’s bad behavior has nothing to do with goodness or badness but instead is a natural route toward personal learning that lasts two decades.
It is not true that if parents do “the right things,” children will be problem-free. Every youngster has to discover how people react to his behavior, and how other people are.
The two discovery processes work together effectively when a child can experiment with bad behavior.
No child acts “good” because of goodness. What looks good or respectful to parents and teachers is an alternative way of acting that works for the child. Similarly, bad behavior can be chosen because it works for the child.
Children act up because they are supposed to. Acting up is one of the natural routes to learning about self control and impulses, how to get close to others and predictable reactions.
If bad behavior is a younger child’s way of learning about herself and about relationships, what then is discipline?
Discipline is most helpful when it is anticipating and organizing. Discipline should be thought of as adult efforts to help a child pace herself. This is often effectively done through routines and rituals that provide the youngster with a kind of predictable structure.
It is normal for children to oppose limits. By the time a child is 3, he can make the clearest rule vague and conditional. Then he marvels how he did it!
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Certainly we can temporarily outsmart, beat and control our children. We can be managers rather than parents. But the costs of preventing “bad behavior” can be large. We can encourage a youngster to be uninspired and lacking curiosity.
Bad behavior is usually trial-and-error learning that requires our input as human beings. Bad behavior can be a child’s way of experimenting with “What if. . .”
Thus bad behavior can be seen as a way of approaching others-not so unlike a smile or boasting about a newly acquired skill.
So what about some discipline principles. Four make sense to me:
– Teach your children about their feelings. Their feelings have names, like anger, excitement and disappointment. They have to respect their emotions as strong and needing regulation. Youngsters need to be able to talk with themselves so they can privately respond to their feelings. Children learn how to do this by watching how their parents relate to each other and to them, when they are upset.
– Set firm routines. As parents become familiar with their children’s regular misbehaviors, they can anticipate them. This is most effective because it neutralizes the excitement around the misbehavior. A child who is combative and disrespectful toward his grandmother will often react differently when the behavior is anticipated by the parent with bored coolness. Warm curiosity is saved for socialized behavior.
– Use time outs. Two or three minutes for little children, five or 10 minutes for older children.
– Punishments are part of life. Effective disciplining and honesty need occasional punishment in regular child-rearing.
The temporary loss of toys, privileges and social contacts is not cruel or harsh. In fact, punishment, when it is appropriate for the behavior and immediately employed, can help the parent to act unemotional and return parent and child to a friendly relationship.