Punishment is unfortunately the only thing that she understands. You could call them consequences, but you’d be sugarcoating the truth. Her having a nuclear meltdown due to being sent to her room isn’t the parents’ fault, and it was eye opening to see just how genetic it is.
(Her sister is as sweet as can be, and they were raised identically by the same parent. Interestingly, both kids are from the same two parents, but the father sadly died.)
I’m not sure why siblings are so different, but I recently noticed it even in dogs — our doggo is an extroverted ham, whereas her sister is standoffish and proud.
If they go to the same school one of them had to go in ‘cold’ while the other went somewhere familiar they had heard the older sibling talk about and had probably visited before, where the teachers already knew the elder sibling and knew some of their friends.
It’s a very different experience and situation to live in.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1364302749307928580?s=21&t=...
Not to outsource my thinking, but it’s not my idea. I only noticed the effect once he pointed it out, and then it seemed obvious.
The refutation to this is three children. If it was true that someone’s character wasn’t inborn, then we should see consistent effects on a middle child on average. But middle children seem equally random. My wife’s sister is an introvert and her other sister an extrovert, and it’s hard to square that with upbringing.
I predict in the future embryo selection will become a new cultural battleground. We’re having a daughter nine months after June, and we know this because it’s now possible to select which gender you want during IVF. It seems a matter of time till the introversion genes are similarly selected for.
> looking disappointed or hurt
That’s punishment
Like throwing out candy when they misbehave?
And also, at least where I live, it is actually against road rules to throw away your crap out of window while you drive. It is kind of littering, except more dangerous as you are at speed.
Like not being able to hear the audiobook they are playing, or missing a turn or crashing the car due to distraction (don't do that).
If a behavior has no consequences and you need to invent punishment, why is the behavior wrong? Just because your personal preference trumps your kids?
You met my mother then?
Negative consequences are best experienced naturally, e.g., “You made art on the walls with crayons even after I asked you not to? Well, here’s my advice on how to clean the wall.” Punishment imposes additional suffering (“consequences”) in hopes that it is a deterrent. In fact, mostly it deters the victim from the punisher, not the behavior.
People who believe in zero punishment have either no experience or a selective memory. Granted, punishment is often overused, but it can be underused, too.
Obviously one’s advice must be age-appropriate, and of course a three-year-old would need some supervision. That’s not an argument in favor of punishment, only parenting.
And if the three-year-old does learn that drawing on the walls is a “cleanup game,” so what? They’ll get better at cleanup. My house isn’t a surgery. After a while they’ll get bored of washing walls, and then have a direct and visceral connection between “1 minute of fun drawing on the walls” and “30 minutes of cleanup afterwards.” That sounds like a great lesson to me.
Punishment apologists lack imagination, and are usually more interested in protecting their own ego and authority instead of providing a safe and useful environment for their kids. There is no “underuse” of punishment; it is always the lesson of sadomasochism: teaching kids that they must love someone and fear them at the same time.
What about denial of privileges or a simple "stand in the corner"? If a kid is being obnoxious right before going to a birthday party, maybe stay home or go late. Or if you're already out, maybe say "this isn't fun anymore" and go home?
I guess you could argue over where the line is between "punishing" and "not rewarding". But I don't think that's a very useful discussion. It's more about how the kid interprets it, and if it's less than they normally get, it feels like a punishment.
I agree with you that POV matters. Telling a young kid, “You can’t have dessert tonight since you’re puking” can easily be interpreted as punishment :D
Some of the things you talk about sound like what I could call “natural consequences,” like cleaning the wall. I don’t think there’s an unambiguous bright line between punishment and consequences. I’ve spent years trying to stay on one side of it, but I don’t think I’ve done it perfectly.
Going late to a birthday party because a kid is “being obnoxious” — I think we could view that several ways. Some parents would call backtalk or opposition or argument “being obnoxious,” and I think that’s entirely wrong — I want him to challenge me, and stick up for what he wants.
If the kid makes a clumsy mistake before the birthday party, maybe he can clean it up when we get back (e.g., spilling Lego, but not milk). If the kid deliberately makes a mess before a birthday party, I might delay and ask them to clean it up first. It’s not always possible for me to understand intent, so if he claims something was an accident I’m very likely to act as if I believe him. There’s less harm in that, I believe, than in attributing malice to an accident.
FWIW I try not to reward or praise him, either; those are both inappropriate uses of power. Those have fuzzy lines, too; “you’re so smart” is praise and I avoid it. “I admire how hard you worked” is talking about my own reaction to empirical facts, so I wouldn’t call it praise.
Paying him $10 for each A on a report card is reward, and I avoid it. Watching a movie on Thursday nights if we get the house cleaned in time seems like natural consequences to me, and I wouldn’t call it a reward.
My own parents provided me many excellent counter-examples and anti-patterns, so before I had a kid I knew I wanted to do it very differently but I didn’t know exactly how. Alfie Kohn’s book, “Unconditional Parenting” informed my thinking about this significantly.
And it is pretty much guaranteed they will try to throw away siblings something is sibling is not doing whatbthey want next time. Kids minic and how you treat then is how they treat other kids in conflict.
Moreover, small kids in car are tied. Literally worst they can do is noise.
I think more context is needed here.
> Question is, how far will they go for a piece of candy...
You are here trying to bank on them acting on rational self interest. But, the initial situation was described as "kids are completely irrational". Threat of throwing away candy they don't have adds even more emotionality and confusion into situation. There is even no initial guarantee they would get candy if they behaved.
Irrational kids wont become rational just because they got scared for candy.
> I think more context is needed here.
I actually agree here.
As a teenager, on one of my first parties involving alcohol, my father said something like this : "Try not to drink a lot, but if you do and feel like you want to come back home, call us and we'll get you home, we will not reprimand you whatever would happen. Don't ride one of your friends car, just call us."
Well, contrary to all my friends who acted like their parents should not know they would drink alcohol, I had a great party with moderately high alcohol consumption. "Fun fact" is that I had to call the emergency services for someone who has had an ethyl coma.
Interestingly, and I think it's correlated, I continued to drink alcohol at parties but my first real hangover was more than 5 or 6 years after, on a place and with people I felt safe with.
_All_ of my friends who were taught that they'll be reprimanded if they drank a lot started to drink a lot secretly at every parties. Most of them aren't even my friends anymore.
What works best is ignoring bad behavior and rewarding good one randomly (so not every time).
And I would warn against overly relying on food as a form of reward and punishment, unless you want to give your kid an eating disorder for the rest of their life.
Citation? And is this actually reproducible?
By default I don’t trust any social / behavioral science study. The field is broken.