Do you do time out or the naughty spot?

[Miss E]

Being afraid of punishments (fallout, retribution, demotion, redundancy, pay-cut, cut in hours, exclusion from social circle etc) is not what being a brave adult in the real world is about. I guess I decided I want my kids to negotiate their terms with the world, so I allow them to negotiate with me - the only hard and fast rules I have in our home are about firearms (we have guns on our farm), moving vehicles, animal welfare and bodies of water. Everything else, pretty much, is negotiable as it hones in those reasoning skills and gives them a sense of control over their own destinies. Pretty confronting to a lot of parents, I concede. It's not the easiest way to parent, either - the brain gymnastics are pretty constant! I know it's not for everyone.

[sloane]

i keep coming back to this thread because it's interesting to read the responses (esp from posters with older/more than one child) but also because i'm still not 100% where i stand on it all.

i guess we are all shaped by our own experiences and my parents did not smack or use something like time out/naughty spot. so, ime, this approach worked. but i'm not sure whether i was just lacking in spirit (& i am an only child) or whether the approach really worked. my mum says that she feels when i was small the tendency was to crush a child's spirit to get them to comply & now there is more freedom for a child to express themselves. so that leaves me wondering - if my child has more spirit, will i need additional measures in order to help curb undesirable behaviour.

so i'm still not at a conclusion but, at the moment, a lot also has to do with DS' personality - for example, he may push me & rather than a punishment i tell him that i know he loves mummy but this is not how we show someone we love them. he usually gets a little upset & then wants to give me a cuddle. i figure that at this point something like pushing is largely about eliciting a response and so i don't want to react too much. i have friends who automatically look to do a time out sort of thing in the same situation or in response to an 'i want tantrum' but that just doesn't sit right with me at the moment.

sorry for the ramble - kudos if you have actually read this far! i just had to try & get some of these thoughts out of my head!

[Smoke Jaguar]

I love the saying that goes "The moment you think the child least deserves a cuddle is the moment the child most needs it". I think this applies in those moments when we have been conditioned to think "He wants attention, so he's not going to get it; ignore the 'bad behaviour'".
The way I see it, and this is consistent with my experience and the outcomes I achieve from this thinking, when the child is 'acting out', we've missed some signs prior to this point that told us we needed to pay attention to something the child needed - usually some emotional attention. Let's face it, when ADULTS miss out on emotional attention there is some behavioural fallout later down the track! How do you feel when you are emotionally neglected by a partner/husband? If you told him that you wanted more time with him, or wanted a hug and he told you that just because you wanted it you weren't going to get it, and he told you this often enough, you would start to question why he thought you didn't deserve it. You would start wondering what hoops you had to jump in order to get that emotional nourishment. This is where a lot of women start buying sexy underwear, cooking creative meals, getting their hair done, thinking of lots of ways to elicit the love they want, and end up filling that gap with other 'behaviours', like over-spending on clothes, overeating (most common!), spending more time on the internet, drinking alcohol etc. They come to believe that the love they get from their partners is conditional, and some start to think of themselves as less worthy of love.
Anyway, if many adults are susceptible to this, how is a child going to process the idea that if they need some attention that isn't a good enough reason to get attention? Answer: they can't. They don't process it well at all, and will 'act out' to get attention. Instead of being punished (however you do it - time out, chair, ignoring), the cause of their attention-seeking behaviour is best sought and acknowledged so that everyone feels valued and the child will learn they don't need to go to certain lengths to get your attention
I fail to see the logic in withholding attention when a child is asking for it. What I see is the teaching of children to set up maladaptive communications for loving relationships, and the cycle continues into adult relationships, much like the one I described above, sometimes worse, sometimes better. It makes attention-giving conditional upon how much you feel like investing the emotional energy into that person, rather than on nourishing that person's spirit and making the relationship much more like its potential than a template of relationships of the past.
I think we all deserve better than we are taught to give

[fionas]

Scarily for both of us Mayaness, I probably actually agree with you and parent more closely to you than you'd think from my responses

I think where we differ is that my parenting is not based on textbooks and I don't believe it's a harder way of parenting. Treating a child with empathy, explaining, seeing things from their point of view actually comes pretty naturally to me. I'm not saying that to blow my own trumpet - I guess I just find the implication that somehow we 'need' to learn this approach from textbooks or making a conscious decision to do it that way a little unusual. But we are all products of our childhood and it sounds like we had very different childhoods Mayaness and I take my hat off to you for undoing your conditioning.

I don't remember any discipline in my childhood. I don't remember any punishments. I don't remember any raised voices and there was one smack on the legs and only one in the 18 years I lived at home. My parents are very quiet and calm people and my dad is particularly considerate. I think that empathy comes very naturally to both of them. Both my parents have no qualifications, are both blue collar workers and have read no books since school. In other words, their parenting approach also did not come from thinking, discussing or reading parenting literature.

I would say that about 90% of the time, I go down the explanation path. I have never put DD1 in timeout and never withheld attention from her BUT I have enforced consequences for bad behaviour. Last night for instance she was throwing a doll around her room that was potentially going to hit me, DP or DD2. She was asked several times to stop. By about the third time, I told her that if she kept doing it there would be no bedtime story. She carried on and it hit DP right where it hurts. There was no shouting, just an explanation that now there was no bedtime story. Of course, she wasn't happy but that was the consequence. There were still hugs and kisses and more explanations at bedtime. But no story and she understood exactly why.