Kids Like Mine

Discipline

A lot of parents think "disciplining" a child and punishing them are the same thing. They aren't remotely the same thing to me.

An example that always comes to mind is that I never took video games away from my kids as a means to make them suffer. If I took away their video games, it was because the games themselves were the source of the problem. If they were fighting over a game, I took away that game (and only that game) and then lectured them that "Games are for FUN. This is obviously not serving its purpose. No game is worth damaging your relationship with your brother over it." I also would lock up the games temporarily so they could do their schoolwork if they were having trouble dragging themselves away from the games and just couldn't resist those "10 minute" video game breaks (that inevitably took 45 minutes or an hour). These consequences ultimately helped them learn self discipline (which to me is the point of "discipline"): My sons learned to just not get into fights over the video games and, instead, learned to negotiate ("I'll play this game with you for an hour if you will play that game with me for an hour"), they learned to not be sore losers and instead to view the chance to play with each other as a win/win situation, and they learned to get their chores and schoolwork done BEFORE they immersed themselves in some game they couldn't tear themselves away from.

In contrast, their father would take games away from them for something "bad" they had done which had nothing to do with the games. He did this to cause them to suffer -- as punishment. It didn't teach them to do as he said and it didn't teach them self discipline. It taught them to resent him and to take a lawyerly approach to anything he said: "But I am IN BED like you said. You didn't SAY I couldn't read." They apparently played stupid and pretended to not understand that dad meant "Go to sleep." Because they are both aspie, taking him literally was highly believable: they take things too literally anyway. They followed "the letter the of law" when it came from their dad while doing all in their power to avoid following the spirit of the law. They generally followed the spirit of the law when it came from me, while not necessarily following the letter of the law (because unlike their dad I never acted like they were "disrespecting me" if they accomplished the thing I wanted accomplished but hadn't done it exactly as I said to).
(I had no idea this was going on at the time. I learned all this later. Talking to my kids since the divorce has been quite informative and intriguing.)

So think about how you react in situations like that -- whether it was when you were in school or at your place of work -- and look for examples in movies of that kind of passive-aggressive means to cope with "damned if you do, damned if don't" rules and understand your child is highly likely to respond the same way. In a word, the response to such controlling, dictatorial, punishing, unreasonable rules is to behave subversively.

So how do you avoid setting up a situation where the only logical thing for the kid to do is behave subversively?

Here are some things that worked well for me:

Make reasonable, logical rules with a real world basis.

An example of this is that I told my sons that I needed to be able to get to their bed without breaking my neck and to their closet/dresser to put away clothes. I told them I didn't care if they put all the toys away, I did care if I was injured because I walked in their room. This gave them an idea of where they could build lego creations (or whatever) that they didn't want moved for the next week or two. Once they had this logical standard explained to them, they consistently followed the rule -- it made sense to them, it was reasonable, it gave them a means to figure out how to do the things they wanted to do and it protected them from the unwanted consequence of mom demolishing their precious creation (whether accidentally or intentionally).

If it is not an emergency situation and you cannot explain your reason for why it should be done that way, you either need to think it through more thoroughly to figure out what the explanation is or you need to consider changing the rule. "Because I said so" should only be used in emergency situations where there is no time to explain your logic. My kids will do as I say when I bark at them because they know it means that time is of the essence: The toilet is overflowing or a giant spider has invaded the house or someone is bleeding. If it isn't an emergency and I can't logically defend why this rule needs to be followed, usually we end up abandoning the rule and coming up with something better. If you want your kids to "respect your authority" you really need to earn that respect. Demanding it merely because you are the parent is a good way to end up with extremely disrespectful, contemptous kids on your hands.

b) Do not dictate how they should comport themselves socially.

Instead of telling my kids they had to behave a certain way because it was the only socially acceptable thing to do, I talked a lot with them about why people reacted to them a certain way, what their other options were, what need they were really trying to meet and then I left it up to them to decide how they wished to handle it. I also talked to them about the fact that sometimes there was no socially acceptable means to accomplish a goal and if the goal really mattered to them, it was okay to do it anyway as long as they were prepared to live with the fall-out.

For example, my oldest argued with me a lot. He really drove me crazy for a long time. When he was 12, I finally figured out how to put a stop to this behavior. I realized that his real purpose was to entertain himself because he was bored. I gave him a conundrum to occupy him and get him off my back. The conundrum was more entertaining than torturing mom by arguing with everything I said. The conundrum I told him was "You always argue with me." If he said "No I don't", then he was arguing with me and thus proving me right. If he said nothing, he was implicitly agreeing. Either way, he "lost". He found this funny and spent two years working his way through this one. When he was over it, he moved on to other things and never again returned to torturing mom.

So the conundrum and trying to find a more constructive means to deal with his boredom was about figuring out what need he was really trying to meet and finding other options for him instead of arguing with mom. We also talked about what some of his other options were, such as joining a debate team, participating in an online forum where debate was the norm and welcomed, and becoming a lawyer if he just loved arguing that much. We talked about the fact that arguing per se is not a bad thing but arguing with everything mom said, all the time, was not socially acceptable behavior and would get him a lot of negative fall out. So we talked about various ways to meet his need and talked about what need he was really trying to meet. In this case, it wasn't so much that he loved to argue as that he was bored. After we found better ways to meet his intellectual needs, the arguments essentially stopped.

Realize that "water runs down hill" and then manicure the hill so the water ends up where you want it instead of screaming at the water for not doing as it's told.

A lot of people give consequences that simply don't work to shape the behavior in the way they are looking for. For example, a lot of parents try to enforce the idea that you must be "nice" to others by being really mean to the child if they fail to behave in a fashion the parent thinks is "nice". That approach fails to teach a child HOW to be nice. It also doesn't teach a child that "being nice" is actually valued or believed in by the parent: If the rules don't apply to the parent's behavior, then the rules themselves are not that important and only a sucker would follow them. That "I don't follow the rules, I make the rules" approach always bombs, and bombs a lot worse with a bright kid who will be quick to tell you what a hypocrit you are.

In order to use the "manicure the hill" approach, you have to be willing to change rules that aren't working instead of upping the ante and increasing the punishment more and more for continued failure to comply. If they are a kid like mine, their failure to comply is not because they are defiant and unwilling to comply. They can't comply. It's kind of like asking them to flap their arms and fly, then breaking their arms if they can't manage to do that.

For example, when I was about 4 or 5 years old, I was often in trouble for picking up the stick of butter and taking a bite out of it. But getting in trouble never stopped me from doing this. Why? Because I have a genetic disorder that wasn't diagnosed until my mid-thirties and I craved the butter: my body needed it so desperately that punishing me was not going to stop me from trying to meet that compelling need. If my son's had done something like that, I would have let them know they could have butter and to just ask me to cut them some and not leave germs and teeth marks all over the butter. Or I might have given them their own stick of butter, in a special dish in a special place in the fridge so they could eat the butter and not mess up the butter everyone else used. Yelling at me me didn't work. Giving me a means to meet my need without doing it in a problematic way would have worked. Denying butter altogether would have been like "breaking my arms" because I would have suffered real physical harm from not getting the healthy fats I needed. (I eat organic butter and coconut oil all the time these days to help me stay off antibiotics, stay out of the hospital, etc.)

As another example, my youngest son tells me that when we homeschooled, their dad tried to enforce a rigid time schedule for what school work to do when. He couldn't work that way. So he used the loophole: if they were not done with their schoolwork by Friday, they could make it up over the weekend. So he did most of his school work over the weekend, when he was allowed to work at his own pace. (I feel like a bad parent now -- I didn't know this was why he worked this way for years. At least we had a loophole.) Their dad also had the policy that if they finished early, they had to start NEXT week's assignments. Piling more work on them as their "reward" made sure they acted as lazy as a typical public school child and didn't do one iota more than they had to. If it had been up to me, they would have been allowed to have a three day weekend if that was what they wanted and more work would have been supplied only if they wanted to work on interesting additional project.

One more example: I was always told by waiters, waitresses and restaurant managers that my kids were amazingly well behaved. The secret to this was to make sure they had a quiet means to entertain themselves. I taught them this from a very early age. When my oldest was about seven months old, I would dig something new out of my purse every five minutes for him to play with. When they were older, they might bring a book with them and read. Restaurants have recognized this approach works and many of them provide paper placemats with activities and crayons. That can be helpful but may not be enough. We also did things like make paper snakes (The Amazing Slithering Snake). My kids didn't have to be constantly told "sit still and behave". They knew how to get their needs met without getting in trouble for it.

Why would anyone choose to be in trouble if they have a better option?