Parenting is a tough job, and an immense responsibility for one to take on. Because of the toughness and stress that comes with this role, a large number of parents go on a dark route with their parenting techniques, and slowly drift into enforcing Parental Oppression over their children. But is is imperative that parents stay away from these overly harsh, strict manipulative and abusive tactics of raising their children. Children deserve respect, patience, and care from the people who have brought them into this world. Children deserve Peaceful Parenting techniques, over oppressive ones.
First and foremost, we must recognize that the role parents play in their children’s lives can vary. Parents take an automatic role of legal guardianship, but how this plays out will vary enormously from one family to another. Considering spectrums of “strictness” and “inclusion” may be helpful, but ultimately, our home life in childhood tends to establish our sense of what is “normal,” regardless of whether we are treated well. If our goal as parents is to raise free, confident, and successful people, whatever these things may mean to your family, we need to learn to create home environments that establish these ideals as normal and acceptable ways of being.
Table of Contents
Power & Discipline
Spanking
How does your family approach discipline and emotional regulation? Although debate in the US continues over what kinds of approaches work best, and individual family needs may vary, it’s worth being deliberate & thoughtful about how we approach conflict within our families. After all, these experiences will contribute to the reference deck that will show our children how conflicts get resolved. If we want our children to learn to approach conflict in healthy, effective ways, we must lead by example. And in order to establish what this means, we can’t simply run on autopilot, repeating what our parents thought was best. We must look for evidence on what works better.
The data has shown us that spanking doesn’t work. In fact, its impact has been found to be counterproductive, and it can even worsen the behavior it seeks to correct. It has been proven time and time again by the scientific community for half a century, yet spanking is still commonplace across the United States. Regardless of specific regulations between public and private institutions, corporal punishment in schools remains legal in 19 states. Meanwhile, spanking in the home remains a cultural norm in all 50 states, with research indicating that approximately half of US parents use spanking with the goal of modifying their child’s behavior, all the while 76% of men and 66% of women believe that spanking is an effective parenting practice. Anywhere that young people can go, it is considered acceptable and sometimes necessary for children to be chastised with physical violence by any adult who holds greater physical and social power than they do. Young people do not deserve to be hit, even when they may make bad decisions or mistakes. Acting on such impulses will only convey that violence is an acceptable approach to interpersonal conflict resolution.
According to a meta-analysis by Elizabeth Gershoff and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, Young people who undergo physical discipline have outcomes “associated with 13 out of a total of 17 […] assessed, including increased aggression, behavioral and mental health problems, and reduced cognitive ability and self-esteem.” Yet these are exactly the behaviors that spanking seeks to curtail. What parents need to understand is that physical discipline exacerbates these behaviors long term, even if it may stop a specific action in the moment. When parents spank or otherwise hit, we are demonstrating that it is okay to lose control, give into rage, and lash out violently. Spanking is not a productive parenting strategy, and it demonstrates a model of adult behavior that young people will certainly make note of.
Yelling
Yelling at young people has also shown to have similar negative effects, and demonstrates that when we are angry, we are allowed to lash out verbally instead of trying to solve the problem. When parents and teachers lose their tempers with children, they demonstrate contempt for young people’s selfhood. The Gottman Institute has analyzed communications structures that destroy relationships, and determined that the most significant determinants are: contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. These approaches don’t resolve conflicts nor instill positive behaviors, but instead destroy relationships. John Gottman calls them “the four horsemen” because they are so destructive.
It can also be helpful to realize how much our culture normalizes speaking to young people in ways that are recognized as forms of verbal abuse among similar aged peers. If you’re frequently tempted to tell your children they’re “just a kid,” to emphasize their dependence on you for their material needs as a debt they owe, or to offer broad, critical characterizations of their negative traits, you may want to begin to reframe your thinking. Remember that how you relate to your children will likely influence how they relate to their own family. Do you want them to seek a partnership they can lovingly collaborate with, where their rights are respected and even celebrated, or to feel they need to threaten and bully those around them to get their basic needs met or addressed?
Finally, I’d like to suggest that we, as parents, should be ready to move past the idea of what “works” and “doesn’t work.” It’s helpful to know that in the context of parenting, violence of any kind tends to have an escalating effect on conflict, including in the long term. However, we need to create sufficient space for our children to find themselves, and this also means recognizing that they are capable of finding a pathway to something that, uniquely, “works” for them. The more we are able to bring transparency, honesty, and respect to the family table, the more our children will absorb the message that they deserve these things both from the world and from themselves. While this will mean something different for every individual, I believe we can work together towards a future where families embrace self-actualization together, and collaboratively support one another in pursuing a life that is rich with love, community, and adventure.
Restrictions
Punishments as a whole are ineffective and disrespectful. These can include time outs, taking away favorite activities, restricting movement for reasons other than safety, and losing recess or extracurriculars. While these may seem gentler and easier for many parents and teachers than approaches like yelling and hitting, they fall far short of what young people need, which is clear communication and restorative, rather than punitive, practices. These punishments tend to convey that obedience is more important than understanding.
Yet even at the most menial jobs, in the most authoritarian workplaces, a well developed sense of personal judgment is an asset. We must ensure young people have the opportunity to develop and explore this sense. To do so, they must have the opportunity to do more than “just follow orders.”
Rewards for Compliance
Unfortunately, rewards don’t make a viable alternative to punishments. In fact, they’re often not only ineffective, but a form of emotional manipulation. In his book “Punished By Rewards,” Alfie Kohn explores how carrot-and-stick approaches to behavior show only short term compliance. We are teaching young people that they must be paid — in stickers, treats, or whatever reward we use — in order to engage in whatever type of behavior we are trying to enforce.
According to this study on the impact of rewards, children as young as 20 months old became less motivated to do tasks after being rewarded for them, compared to children who were permitted to engage in tasks solely for their own sake.
What Now?
“Punish and reward” systems are typically justified by a logic that sees young people as fundamentally incomplete, and not truly human beings yet, rather than as real, feeling people who may still be in the process of developing their relationship to themselves and the world. The young people in your life may still be struggling with emotional regulation at a developmental level, as well as how to approach conflict resolution from a practical standpoint. They are not people who want to be mired in petty arguments that escalate into violence and screaming, any more than you are. They have a right to feel physically safe developing the skills they will need to approach conflict in healthy, productive ways.
If rewards are counterproductive, and punishments are damaging and ineffective, if spanking and yelling do far more harm than good, how can families cultivate a harmonious, respectful home? I’m not going to lie to you, it takes work. But the long term impact is a worthwhile endeavor for the entire family, and an important investment in both the wellbeing of families as a whole and that of the young people in our lives.
Motivation
Unfortunately for parents and teachers, abandoning these tried-and-untrue methods leaves us with a more difficult task: tapping into intrinsic motivation, which is a self-directed initiative for people of all ages. Understanding the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is key to understanding the worrying impact of using either punishments or rewards to motivate young people. Developing intrinsic motivation is powerful, valuable, and can be the difference between living a life you can tolerate (sometimes) and living your best life.
Simply put, I have learned to do things like chores not because I was afraid of being hit or having someone scream curse words at me, and not because I expected someone to praise me or give me something nice in payment, but because I have learned that I enjoy living in a well maintained space. If I am intrinsically motivated, I freely operate towards my own success from a position of confidence. Isn’t that what we want to be able to do?
Connection & Respect
Respecting Play
In order to tap into intrinsic motivation, humans need self awareness. If I understand myself, I can tell you whether I work better in the morning or afternoon, what kinds of workflows motivate me, how I stay interested in something over the long term, and what kind of goals make me happy. It may sound obvious, but young people live in an environment of escalating micromanagement, and their opportunities for developing this kind of self understanding are rapidly vanishing. Instead, they are spending most of their day following explicit directions with specific right answers. Even their approaches to solving a simple math problem can be marked wrong if they get the right answer but fail to show their work. Increasingly, we live in a culture that indoctrinates young people into a mindset of extrinsic motivation and compliance, rather than creative problem solving and mental agility.
By expanding access to free, unstructured play, and respecting young people’s autonomy, we can support them in building a better future for themselves, and a more personally fulfilling life. Evolutionary psychologist Dr. Peter Gray explains how limiting access to play hinders development and independence:
“Sadly, in many cases, the assumption that children are incompetent, irresponsible, and in need of constant direction and supervision becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The children themselves become convinced of their incompetence and irresponsibility, and may act accordingly. The surest way to foster any trait in a person is to treat that person as if he or she already has it.” (Gray, Free To Learn).
Unstructured play allows young people to experiment with interpersonal conflict resolution, management of their own physical and emotional energy, and discover intrinsic motivation. It also helps to develop an internal locus of control, which is our internalized concept of whether we are in control of ourselves and our lives. During childhood, our locus of control is, practically speaking, external: parents, school, and sociological factors such as economic status all have immense power in our lives. In childhood there is little we can do to change this or improve our situation, unless we are somehow granted access by these gatekeepers. However, if we believe that young people must immediately take control of their destinies at age 18, we must ensure they first have access to begin experimenting with autonomy, self-regulation, and self-direction. Otherwise, we are throwing them in a wide ocean with no lifeboat.
Parent Gently
That said, parents may also need to strengthen these skills. When children see that parents can cope with negative feelings and conflict in healthy ways, and can freely choose healthy and productive activities, they’re provided with a model of how to begin to do so for themselves. Rather than enforcing feigned respect through coerced obedience, which is often counterproductive, parents can model appropriate behavior through compassion, transparency, and effective self-regulation.
Peaceful parenting, or gentle parenting, is a parenting style that respects the rights of young people by interacting with them in healthy, collaborative ways, rather than spanking, yelling, or coercion.
So, what is peaceful parenting? Dr. Laura Markham describes peaceful parenting as a style with three components:
- Parents must regulate their own emotions effectively
- Parents commit to fostering a strong parent-child connection, and
- Parents love their child unconditionally.
Sounds easy, right? But, when we think about how our society fails to support parents in meeting their needs, that number one commitment — to regulate our own emotions — can be excruciatingly hard. For starters, the United States is the only major country on Earth that does not provide paid maternity leave. Not only that, but parents also live in a culture of judgment, and worry that their actions, regardless of whether they’re strict or lenient, will damage their child. What we as parents need is not only community & economic support to help us support our families, but to open our eyes to the fact that the key to having a functional home is creating an atmosphere of responsible transparency with our children.
Additionally, by the time we are adults, we must recognize that conflict escalation is a taught behavior, just like conflict de-escalation. When parents become emotionally dysregulated, they may fall back to whatever was practiced in their home during their own childhood: spanking, yelling, swearing, criticism, you name it. This is why it’s critical for parents to engage in conscious planning and deliberate self regulation in order to break the cycle of conflict escalation within the home. Gentle parenting advocates like Philip Mott can also offer some tips for how to stop a power struggle with kids. Hint: the first step is for the parent to step back and calm down.
Start With You
As a parent, it was easy for me to notice that my young children can become emotionally dysregulated by all kinds of predictable things: not enough sleep, a late nap, being very hungry or thirsty, overexertion, overstimulation, understimulation, and unexpected changes. It was easy for me to see that it was my job to help them meet their needs, as well as to help prepare them for situations which might be stressful.
What came harder was that I would have to make sure I was keeping up with these same factors in myself, so that I wouldn’t get stressed out when my kids got stressed out. Growing up is inherently challenging, but having a parent who is exhausted, hungry, and burning the candle at both ends makes things harder.
However, it’s not our children’s job to provide us with emotional support and stability. Whether it’s giving yourself a routine, talking to a therapist, or beginning to journal your moods, it’s important for parents to find ways to remain receptive and calm, even when it may be a struggle.
Work Together
Committing to a strong parent-child relationship is also key. If we believe that our decisions are correct, they should not need force in order to be persuasive. They should only need persuasion! If you have not tried it, I encourage you to begin to explain some of the reasoning for your decisions to the young people in your family, and ask them for their feedback. You may also find that the young people in your life have great ideas for how to do things better. They may also have genuine questions you can answer, which will help them better understand your approach.
Gentle parenting asks us to have great boundaries. We tend to think of boundaries as a way to “keep out,” but boundaries also allow us to engage in deliberate inclusion. Young people should not be burdened with the responsibility to manage the family or household, but they can be respectfully included in the discussion of decisions that impact their lives. By being open to their voices, we learn about what may not be working for them. We also show that their thoughts and feelings have value. Young people deserve to be informed and included.
Make Decisions & Mistakes
Youth is a time of exploration. In early life, decisions and actions are not indicators of fundamental “goodness” or “badness,” but rather a form of experiment. This is not to say that our actions are not sometimes serious, or long term, with significant natural consequences. But for each individual, we approach each new day unsure of what it holds, or of what kind of responses will “work” if we are to further our goals.
Young people are faced with the need to make decisions of all kinds with limited information. Like all of us, young people are still in the process of accumulating life experience, and many of the problems they must solve are completely new. While endless lectures about “how we did it back in my day” may feel helpful to the person making the offering, such information is often outdated, out of context, and inapplicable. Consider how fast the world has changed during your life, in every imaginable way!
We are all still experimenting with our approaches to solving problems, and we tend to learn best by experience, or even by making mistakes (and collecting the data!) Our children need to know that we won’t humiliate them, badmouth them, or insult them when they try something and it doesn’t work out. They need to know we respect the ways in which their context may be different from ours. And they need to know that when they take a different path than the one we would have chosen for them, that they are still loved and included — that they always will be, even when things go wrong.
Practice Authenticity
Growing up, I watched parents shut their own children out for reasons that ranged from deciding to pursue art instead of dentistry, to coming out of the closet. Ultimately, these parenting strategies typically did nothing to dissuade my young friends from their path in life, but did immense damage to both their family relationships and self-esteem.
And when parents were successful in imposing their agendas, their children were often unhappy with the path they took, they regretted not being true to themselves, or not following their dreams. Their lives were not improved, but instead tainted with an endless echo of “but what if I had?”
Parents have a choice. Our role should be clear: we are meant to support our children’s self-actualization and their path to finding their happiness. They are not a proxy by which we can compensate for our own regrets. They are not our second chance at doing our own lives over, but better this time. They are their own first and only chance.
It’s worth asking ourselves what our expectations are for the young people in our lives, and whether it’s reasonable to imagine they share those as goals. For example, a parent who is a painter may struggle to be supportive of their child who prefers math, and a parent who is an engineer may find they feel the same about their child who prefers playing music. But young people are not our blank pages to write our story on. They are writing their own story. If we want to be a part of it, we must embrace the fact that it is truly theirs.
