
Ep 2: Have We Forgotten How to Discipline?
Raising Parents with Emily Oster- 612 views
- 25 Sep 2024
There are a lot of different approaches to discipline, and they’ve changed wildly in America over the decades. On one end of the spectrum, there’s the old school, 1950s approach: spanking. Then, there are middle-ground approaches: time-outs, warning systems, consequences, and punishments. And then, there are the fairly new approaches on the way other end of the spectrum. These are the kind of approaches that claim that the right way to parent is not to punish your child, but rather to help your child understand why they’re frustrated and to help them work through their frustration. “Gentle parenting”—sometimes called “respectful parenting” or “attentive parenting”—has become really popular in the last few years, and if your social media feeds are anything like ours, you’ve heard all about it and been told you need to do it.
The question many parents are asking is: We have been told that spanking was bad, and we shouldn’t go back to it. But have we gone too far in the other direction? Has gentle parenting led us to permissive parenting, where kids are learning that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want? And yes, there are consequences of being too hard on your kids, but what are the consequences of being too soft on them? Today: How should we be disciplining the next generation of kids? And have we gotten too soft on them along the way?
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Resources from this episode:
Abigail Shrier: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Dr. Thomas Phelan: 1-2-3 Magic: Gentle 3-Step Discipline for Calm, Effective, and Happy Parenting
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be
Hal Chaffee: How to Spank Your Kids the Right Way
Hi, everyone. Emily here, and you're listening to Raising Parents, my new podcast in partnership with the Free Press, where we interrogate all of the big and pressing and confusing questions facing parents today. Before we get to the show, I'm so excited to tell you that this season is in partnership with Airbnb. If you know anything about me, you know how much I love Airbnb. I think I'm currently holding six Airbnb reservations in my account. Airbnb has provided incredible experiences for me, my family, and our friends across the country and the world, time and time again. More on that and how you, too, can use Airbnb on your next family trip later in the episode. For now, onto the show. Are we too soft on kids?
Yeah, I would say we're too soft on kids.
Well, sometimes. Soft? I don't know about that.
Do you think that we are too soft on kids?
I do believe that we're too soft on kids. I don't think that we're creating a generation where children have to earn something, right? I think now when kids are little or even with my own kids, I've seen the experience where even at a very young age, everybody gets a trophy for just showing up.
For my generation, I grew up in the '70s, and discipline was very rules-oriented.
Whenever our parents said, Do something, we just did it. There was no questioning. If we didn't adhere to what was being asked of us, we would definitely have repercussions.
I don't think we know how to discipline our kids anymore because we're scared to discipline them, just in case our kids feel any negativity towards us because we're so busy wanting to be friends with our kids that we forget that we're actually their parents.
Your child is angry. They didn't get what they wanted. Maybe they're two, and they just wanted a cookie before dinner. Maybe they're five and you didn't buy them that light-up blue hippo they were asking for at Target. Maybe they're eight and they're not allowed to play with mud inside. It's not fair. You're so mean. I'm going to hit you. And then maybe they proceed to do just that, to hit you. Or maybe they proceed to rip pages out of a book. Or maybe if they're a teenage girl, they just run up to their room, slam the door shut, and give you the silent treatment for a week. These are among the very hardest moments of parenting. What do you do when your child misbehaves? How do you discipline them when they're doing something they should not be doing? If you don't tell me the truth, I'm going to put you across my knee. There are a lot of different approaches to discipline, and they've changed wildly in America over the decades.
If you go near that man again, I'll take you over my knee and give you a spanking you'll never forget.
And that goes before- Of course, on one end of the spectrum, there's the old-school 1950s-style approach, spanking.
I think a good waiting would help you to change, too.
Oh, Yeah, who's going to give it to me?
I am.
Which, as you might guess, has declined in popularity over the decades. If your parents are spanking their children, the form of discipline has been on the decline among US parents, both rich and poor, since 1988. Then there are middle ground approaches of timeouts, of warning systems, and of consequences and punishments. Count one, two, three, then you have a timeout. Look at me.
I don't have to listen to you. You be mean. If you leave this table, you will go in timeout.
Do you understand that? There'll be no more fresh voices and naughty behavior.
We're going to go right back in the time out.
Okay. Then there are the fairly new approaches on the way other end of the spectrum. We reject the notion of authority a libertarian discipline where the adult is the authority figure and the child must obey without any rhyme or reason.
Instead, we're encouraging collaboration between the adult and the child.
These are the kinds of approaches that claim that the right way to parent is not to punish your child, but rather to help your child understand why they're frustrated and to help them work through their frustration. Gentle parenting, sometimes called respectful parenting or attentive parenting, has become really popular in the last few years. If your social media feeds are anything like mine, you've heard all about it from accounts like Big Little Feelings, Mr. Chaz, Laura Love, and a billion others. Respectful parenting is basically having an awareness of your child or baby's perspective. That's as simple as it is. Jonas, time to get ready so we can go to the store. No. Are you not ready to go to the store yet? No. Do you need two minutes or four minutes before we go to the store?
Three minutes.
Three minutes? Yeah. Okay, I'll give you three minutes, and then we'll go get dressed to go to the store. Let's put your three-minute Timer on. You want Mama to do it or you want to do it?
I'll do it. Time's up.
No. Do you You want to skip over there so I could put your clothes on, or do you want to hop like a bunny?
Hop like bunny.
You're going to hop like a bunny? Okay, come on. Let's hop, hop, hop. Over this way. Hop, hop, hop. Are you ready to go? Yeah. Okay. It sounds promising. After all, based on the name, it would appear that the alternative is something like harsh parenting, which I may occasionally veer into but would certainly like to avoid. Gentle parenting is, to be clear, a completely made up term, and it isn't one well-defined thing. But it is, broadly speaking, a method of parenting which centers around managing difficult behaviors without consequences or punishments. You might redirect your child or set a boundary, But you won't use any disciplinary approaches when a kid is misbehaving. Also, this approach has a strong focus on talking it out, even with smaller children. In many ways, I think that gentle parenting can be explained as a backlash to authoritarian parenting, which characterized the previous generation. Our parents were really tough, so now we're going to be really forgiving. It's all cyclical, isn't it? The question I think many parents today are asking is, Okay, we've been told that spanking was bad, definitely bad, and we shouldn't go back to it. But have we gone too far in the other direction?
Has gentle parenting led us to permissive parenting, where kids are learning only that they can do whatever they want whenever they want? And yes, there are consequences of being too hard on your kids. But what are the consequences of being too soft on them?
Is it true that we're getting a little too soft on our kids, and it's not making them as mentally tough as they should be to be prepared for the world?
We don't have to unpack every last emotional experience that our children have. A lot of people say gentle parenting is going to create a bunch of self-centered children. And some parents might even be asking, Was spanking all that bad? So what does the data say? A few facts right from the start. According to the World Health Organization, around 60% of children globally regularly experience physical punishment by their parents or caregivers. However, physical punishment has been shown in a variety of studies to be associated with worsened behavior in the long term. In contrast, there is experimental data showing positive parenting approaches. That's a catch-all for approaches which rely on consequences like timeouts, but not physical punishment. Can improve behavior and family function. Gentle parenting goes a step further, but here we have no good data. That is, nothing in the academic research literature which would tell us that gentle parenting produces better outcomes or worse ones. Our information is incomplete. With this in mind, for today, how should we be disciplining the next generation of kids, if at all? And have we gotten too soft on them along the way? I'm Emily Oster, and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents.
Emily Oster, an economist by trade, has gathered the data, crunched the numbers, and is now debunking some of the most controversial myths about parenthood.
I think what everyone is most interested in, pregnant women, they're like, Can I drink? You shouldn't have a lot. Where is this data coming from? The fundamental answer is we get data on people by asking people about their behaviors and what they do and by collecting collecting information on how their kids do. Oster doesn't shy away from other charged topics. People are using your database as an example as to why schools should reopen. What reaction did you get to that? I imagine that was a little controversial. It was a little controversial. Well, yes.
You're an economist. You're not a doctor.
What do you think people are going to take away from what you've written in this book? All that I'm trying to do here is really show women here is what the evidence is, and why don't you think about some of these decisions for yourself? Episode 2, Have we forgotten how to discipline kids?
I think as a parent, I've struggled with the question of how to discipline my kid probably every second of every day since I became a mom.
This is Jessica. She's a mom of a two-year-old boy.
Yesterday, I took my child to the bike shop to buy him a helmet for the bike that we share. He gets a popsicle, we buy the bike helmet, and he has a meltdown that I can't let him out of the stroller. And despite his very loud, shrieking and bodily protest, I continued to push him home without necessarily doing much to intervene other than to just let him live through the feeling as Other people on the street watch me push a absolutely wild, violently, shrieking toddler down the street. And by the time we got home, he'd cooled down, and I think it passed. But I don't know, was I supposed to stop the stroller and kneel down next to him and interrogate his feelings and ask him what he was going through? If I had done that, would that have helped? Would it have made it any shorter? Would he have felt validated by my attention? Or was it a good thing that I spent on home and decided not to attend to the outburst and just waited till it passed? I don't know. I have no idea.
If you're listening to this and you have at some point had a toddler, you're probably thinking of a similar situation to Jessica's. Tantrums are at the more extreme end of toddler acting out, and nearly everyone has a story about one, usually one that occurred in public. Usually, there's at least one that will stick with you for the rest of your life. So how to stop it? Well, I'm sorry to say that that's a trick question, and there really isn't a one-size-fits-all answer here. That's because, and I know it is terribly cliché to say this, but every child is different. Take my own experience as a child. When I misbehaved when I was little, my mother's solution was to ask me to sit on the stairs and think about it. I would totdle off to the stairs, sit for a while, I would contemplate my mistakes, and then return to explain what I did wrong, and that I would not do it again. My mother congratulated herself on being an amazing parent who was deeply in touch with her child and didn't need to resort to the go-to-your-room discipline that others practiced. And then my brother, Steven, arrived.
He didn't want to sit on the stairs and think about it when he misbehaved. In fact, he loudly refused. Things escalated to him being sent to his room. Also refused. My mother found herself physically carrying him to his room, shutting the door and holding the door closed with all her strength while he screamed and tried to get out. The point is, parenting is more about the child than about the parent. Side note, Steven is a wonderful and successful adult who was and remains a great brother. When my own kids were born, I repeated a similar pattern. Penelope, my oldest, never had a tantrum. When Fin, the second, had one, I couldn't believe it. There was so much yelling. I asked my husband, Do you think he's sick? Should we take him to the doctor? He looked at me like I was a crazy person. He's not sick. He's two. And so suddenly, unexpectedly, as a second-time mom, I found myself needing help.
I think we are too soft. I don't think we expect much of anything of our kids, and I don't think we know how to handle trouble when it comes up.
This is Dr. Tom Falen, and he's the guy who helped me with Fin.
But God knows our ability to encourage kids' independence is not there. We're too soft that way. We're afraid of consequences. We think you can talk everything out. That's too soft also.
Dr. Falen is a clinical psychologist, a dad of two, and the author of a book called One, Two, Three, Magic, which teaches how to discipline children from the age of two to about 10 to 12 years old. It was first published in 1995 and has since sold over 2 million copies. Now I know what you're thinking, and let me tell you, I, too, was skeptical about a parenting method with the word magic in the title. But it worked. I would love for you to just start by explaining the goal of this approach or how it works in general terms.
The idea is that to get along well with your kids, you need to have a fairly orderly house. I'm a believer that parenting is not a democracy, that the parents are in charge, but no arguing, yelling, spanking. What we One, Two, Three, Magic, we tell parents you got three jobs: discouraging negative behavior, encouraging positive behavior, and bonding with your kids. You do those three things, you'll be a pretty good parent.
One of the things I like about your book, it is very simple and in some ways, for I mean in a positive and not a negative way, it's not difficult to implement.
Yeah. For discouraging negative behavior, we have the famous counting, where you could call signaling. It's extremely simple. You hold up one finger and say, That's one when the kid's tantruming or throwing the football in the house. It's easy for parents to do, especially under conditions of emotional stress, which parents experience a lot of the time. For the positive behavior, we do routines. You want a routine for bedtime, routine for homework. For bonding, my favorite tactics are active listening. El numero uno of anything for people getting along is shared fun. It does seem a little formulaic, and I suppose it is, but that's there because of the emotional stress, among other things, because when people are stressed, they lean toward yelling and spanking, which I think make things go the wrong direction.
Let's talk about what you mean by counting. This is not just in the context of bedtime, but any bad behavior When you say we're going to count, tell me what that means.
Counting is a signal. You can do two things when a child is doing something you don't want them to do, like whining. Whining drives parents insane. So when a child is whining, you can say, Use your big girl voice. If that works, that's fine. If it doesn't, we're going to use a signal. And the signal that we use is counting. I hold up my finger, one finger, I say that's one. That indicates from previous experience, we've also rehearsed this, that you have now been given a warning because you're involved in some obnoxious behavior. You got five seconds to shape up. If you don't shape up, I give you a two, five more seconds, you hit the three. Then we're going to use rest period, time out.
I want to talk about the emotion piece of this or the part of this that's about parenting because it's discipline for parents because so much of what you talk about is focused on the idea of parents not engaging emotionally with bad behavior in particular. Why is that important?
It's really important for a lot of reasons. One is it doesn't work very well. I mean, it's true, you can yell or intimidate a child into compliance some of the time, but as a long term strategy, that's really bad news. You don't want to do that. But one of the discoveries, I think, of one, two, three magic is the evil of talking. We say communication is great. The more communication, the better. That is absolutely wrong because a lot of these conversations go through what we call the talk persuade, argue, yell, hit syndrome. I talk to a kid, it's bedtime. Bedtime is not negotiable. Now the kids got me in negotiating about bedtime. So talk, and then I persuade them to go to bed, and then I argue with them, then I yell, and maybe I hit them. A lot of parents will choose hitting it. So what we're getting is a transition to violent parenting or yelling parenting because the parent talked at the wrong time or didn't use the right technique, which would have been a routine for bedtime or a signal for a tantrum or something like that. And these days, people are geared toward talk.
You got to talk everything out. There are parents that believe everything has to be talked out. I'm sorry, it's not a democracy. That's wrong.
I was trained to work with parents in a very behavioral approach. I was trained how to give a time out, how to do ignoring, how to do praise, how to do sticker charts, what type of consequences were, natural consequences, the whole thing. I started to see in my practice as I delivered this method, because I did. I was young at the time. I took it for granted. This is what people do, and I want to do the right thing. There were things that we assume to be true that I really think are worth questioning.
This is Dr. Becky Kennedy. She's a clinical psychologist and a mom of three with, get this, over 2.7 million followers on Instagram, and she only started her account in 2020.
Three words that can stop a toddler tantrum in its tracks. I believe you. Your toddler is very upset that you said no to having an ice cream Sunday for breakfast. Say these words to your toddler. You really wanted that ice cream Sunday now. I believe you. While you hold your boundary. Your child is looking for your support, not your solutions. This is true at every age. Let's say you have a toddler and they can't Can't figure out a puzzle and they're frustrated. They're looking for you to say, Oh, this is a hard puzzle. Not, I'll do that piece for you. I want to tell you why I'm not getting my kids a dog. I am at maximum capacity in my life right now. I feel that almost every day. I know that Even more than wanting a dog, my kids want a safe and secure family home. Remember, you might be saying no to your kid's request for a dog, but what you are saying yes to is really their ultimate need for a parent who is as sturdy and grounded as possible. Knowing your limits as a parent is a sign of- I think her skyrocketing popularity shows just how desperate parents are today to figure this out.
Number one, why does a kid need to be punished after they engage in a bad behavior. Why? It sounds like a silly thing to question, but to really be curious, why is that helpful? Is that going to help people learn? Number two, why do kids engage in all this bad behavior then? It's a Good question. Why do good people do bad things? And I really do believe it comes to a lack of skills. We actually understand how skills play out in most areas of life. Why doesn't my three-year-old know how to swim? Because they don't have the skills to swim. If I want my kid to swim, I have to teach them the skills. Age on its own does not bring skills. We know this because there's adults who can't swim. Okay, if I have a good kid having a hard time, what would my kid need? Just very practically, okay, well, he would need to feel connected to me because kids need to feel secure to behave well. But also, he'd need a skill, a literal skill, to manage whatever feeling came up right before he hit his brother. Okay, so what if I taught my kids some of those skills and practice them with them?
You know what happens when you do that? Your kid's behavior improves. There's no trade-off here.
Dr. Becky is the founder of Good Insight, which she describes as a new method for working with parents. To be honest, it's a bit hard to pin down in a sentence or two, but it's basically a method of disciplining, which doesn't believe in disciplining. Instead, it's based on the premise that there are no bad kids or even bad behaviors. It's our job as parents to understand what these bad behaviors signify and what our child might need from us at that moment. She's often characterized as a gentle parenting guru, which, despite its overwhelming popularity with millennial parents today, also comes with a good amount of eye rolling and criticism. Here's how comedian Claude Stuart described it.
So my wife wants to raise our child in the style of a gentle parent. Now, for those of you who don't know, let me explain. If you're a gentle parent, that means no spanking, no yelling, no shaming. If you're a gentle parent, your only form of discipling your child is to acknowledge their feelings and just hope they stop being a little jerk.
I understand this reaction. As I said before, I use the one, two, three magic approach with my own kids. But Dr. Becky pushes back on this pushback. She thinks these approaches are misunderstood and wouldn't call her approach gentle parenting at all. Instead, the good inside phrase is sturdy parenting.
Here's step one. We need to replace we don't and please stop with I won't let you. It's a huge difference. It's not just the semantics, it's actually the stance. And I call that stance, embodying your authority as a parent. Your kid is hitting, this is going to come full circle, because they're having a set of feelings that they don't yet, yet, have skills for. Feelings without skills always manifest as behavior for adults, too. All the time. Bad behavior is a sign we had a feeling that was too big for skills. So I can't expect my kid in that moment to stop their behavior. It's my job. I need to protect my kid from seeing himself as the kid who hits. So I'm going to stop their behavior. I'm not going to let them do it again because I love you. So that's step one is a boundary. A boundary is something you tell your kids you will do, and it requires your kid to do nothing. Please stop is not a boundary because it's asking your kid to do something. We don't hit, not a boundary. I won't let you hit. And then actually getting between my kids is a boundary because it's literally an embodiment of my authority.
And after we set a boundary to stop the damage, we connect to the good kid under the bad behavior. Because if we can't differentiate who our kid is from what they did, they won't be able to differentiate that either. And then they start to form their identity as a bad kid. And you know what kids with bad identity do? They engage in bad behavior.
How do we prevent that bad behavior without timeouts or punishments, you ask?
We want to teach our kids that their feelings are real and matter. We also want to teach our kids that their feelings don't I get to dictate what everyone does. That is a dangerous thing to teach, and I think that's the overcorrection. And to me, the second correction toward the middle is, your feelings are real and my boundaries and role as your parent is also real. And I will not let you turn feelings into out-of-control behaviors. And when I show you, I can differentiate. And I show you the feeling is okay, this behavior is not, and I will also teach you a skill so you can express that feeling differently. Now, all of a sudden, my kid is going to go into adulthood with the repertoire of skills that kids really need, which is just that. I'm allowed to have feelings. I've learned how to manage them. My feelings don't mean I get to dictate other people's world. My feelings don't mean I get to do any certain behavior at all. My job is to manage my feelings so I can show up in a respectful way. That's actually where we get kids to with this approach.
I think when kids, over and over, their, quote, undesirable behaviors are met with a time out, what they actually learn is there's a whole set of undesirable feelings. I'm not really learning skills to manage those. I'm Actually layering in my circuit, like shame and distance on top of those, which ironically just make them harder to manage.
I'm not here to say that Dr. Becky's methods are not good. Many people say they work, and they might work for you. It's just that we don't have any systematic evidence that they will. As I said before, this approach to parenting, the broader scope of gentle parenting, it isn't a defined thing, and so we don't have any systematic data on it. The idea that gentle parenting supports attachment, that's theory, not data. The thing I can say is I talk to a lot of parents in my work, and many of them tell me that gentle parenting is really, really hard to implement in practice. It feels like an almost impossible task for a parent to take on amidst everything else going on in the house. One mom, Erin, who has a seven-year-old daughter, told us that she loses her temper too often to do the gentle parent approach. I try the whole acknowledging her emotions, which I don't think is bad. I think she actually tends to calm down. She's starting to reason more now with not the gentle, but acknowledging the feelings. The other day, she snapped at me, and then she started crying a few minutes later.
She's like, I'm so sorry. That wasn't right me to do. I was like, Okay, maybe this is working a little bit, but I lose my temper a lot, so I don't think I could ever call myself a gentle parent. My read of the literature is that timeouts work in the sense that if you look at randomized evaluations of some of these programs that have timeouts as a component, that you will see changes in family behavior functioning. It is a thing that works for many people. By works, I mean that it improves behavior. I want to differentiate between at random being like, That's it, go to your room, from a measured, like, That's a warning, that's a second warning, that's a timeout, in a way that kids expect in a consistent manner. The perfectly implemented Tom Falen, One, Two, Three, Magic approach to timeouts.
I really try not to be a purist about most things.
Again, Dr. Becky.
Do timeouts mess up your kids forever? No, I would not say that. But there's a couple of things. Number one, data is only part of a story. If I told my kid that they had to sleep on the street every time they hit their brother, I promise you they would change their behavior. Now, is that data worth bragging about? Did that work? I think we have to really break down what work means. I think change in behavior I think it's a dangerous outcome on its own to measure working by. Number two, timeouts are a far superior option to physically abusing a child. I mean that, to hitting a child in any way. And they are. If I think about the prevalence still of physical abuse, and if I think about a parent who's saying, Okay, instead of hitting my child, I'm going to send them to their room, which, by the way, would literally physically stop a parent from doing that because there'd be separate generation. I think that makes a lot of sense.
Spanking your kid is not going to cause some emotional damage that's going to be with them for the rest of their life.
This is Hal Chaffee. He's a pastor at a church, a dad of six, and he blogs about parenting. Now, I should say upfront that there is a large body of literature on physical punishments, in particular, like spanking, showing that they are associated with worse behavior at older ages. To surface my personal views, I do not believe in spanking, completely independent of anything in the data. Even if the data suggested this was the best form of discipline, I would not do it because I don't believe in it. Still, I wanted to talk to him and hear him out. After all, a lot of parents do spank.
I think that's what people believe. I think they're just they're convinced that spanking is going to somehow scar their child for life.
Why do you think people How do you think that?
Because people equate spanking with abuse. Yeah. There are extremes on every end. Spanking is perfectly fine and acceptable. But if you go to an extreme, that's abuse.
How do you see that line?
I think that is blurry, I guess. But I think the best way to never even get close to that line is to make sure that everything you're doing towards your child is in love and respect and honor. I spank my kids not because I'm angry that they did something wrong. I spank my kids because I love them and I want to see them succeed in life. I know that if I let them be undisciplined, then it's going to hinder their future.
This philosophy can most aptly be summed up as sparing the rod spoils the child, or that kids who aren't spanked are more likely to grow up entitled or lacking respect for themselves and others.
Well, practically, your kids should do what you tell them to do. If you live in a household where your kids don't listen to you, you're going to have chaos and misery. You're going to be a miserable parent. In my household, I have a general expectancy that my kids are going to do what I tell them to do. Now, I know some people might think, Well, He's just a dictator. He just dictates things and his kids do it. No, that's not how it rolls. The way it works is if I have an idea in my head of something I want my kids to do, I say, Hey, you got to clean your room. Most of the time, I give my kids the opportunity to protest if they'd like to. I think that's reasonable. If it's a reasonable protest, sometimes I'll say, Okay, finish your TV program, and then you got to clean your room. But the bottom line is you got to clean your room, and that's going to happen. If it gets to the point where they're defiant and they're not going to... Which doesn't happen in my household, by the way. There isn't defiance in my household, then that's when some discipline is called for.
Usually, that happens at a real young age, from my experience. As my kids have grown older, my oldest is a 14-year-old and my youngest is a two-year-old, but I have in between. As they're younger, they have that natural defiance. I mean, it's there in a two-year-old. You don't put it there, it's just there. It's It's there, and they will test you and you'll tell them to do something. You as a parent, you know that they know what you're saying. You know that they understand you. If you let them get away with that defiance, that defiance just continues into their older years. But if you say, Hey, buddy, and this is how my parenting rolls, Hey, buddy, listen, I asked you to do this. You can either do it or you're getting a spanking. What are you going to do? There'll be a couple of times you have to give them a spanking, but after they that, Hey, I got to do what dad says, then the spankings happen way, way less often. I pretty rarely spank my kids, very rarely. I haven't spanked my girls since they were probably four or five years old. I just haven't needed to.
Now, now that they're older, I use different punishments with them. I'll give them extra chores or extra cleaning or something like that. But I do think that in the younger formative years, spanking is really important.
A lot of people get the idea that if kids don't follow rules, there should be consequences. That makes sense. But physical punishment to me seems like a slippery slope when emotions are high. But Hal has specific rules when it comes to spanking.
I don't spank them with my own interest in mind. I spank them with their interest in mind. When I do that, I'm not going to do it in a way that's abusive. Are you an angry person? Don't spank your kids when you're angry because when you're angry, you do stupid stuff. I never spank my kids when I'm angry, and I rarely get angry. It's like when my kids do things that are wrong, it doesn't surprise me. It's like, that's What kids do. I'm not going to get upset about it. There are times, I'm not going to lie, there's sometimes I do get angry, especially when my kids hurt each other or talk bad to each other. But I never have grabbed my kid and run off in anger and spank them. I think that's wrong. If you don't do that, I don't think you're going to abuse them.
What about timeouts or other forms of discipline?
First of all, how do you put a two-year-old in timeout? It's very difficult. It's not like you got to really whack a two-year-old, just a little swot on the your end or something like that will help them to understand what they're doing is wrong. It works. Done it with all my kids. Never had terrible twos like people talk about. Actually, two years old is one of my favorite times as their children. They're so cute and so much fun. I think that other forms of discipline are fine. I just think if you're trying them and they don't work, spanking your kid is not going to cause some emotional damage that's going to be with them for the rest of their life. I grew up among many people, many who I've talked to who are now grown, functioning, well-adjusted adults who were all spanked when they were children. Not only did they say, Well, I turned out okay, they'll say, Listen, I believe that because my parents spanked me, it helped me to become the person that I am today. They have great relationships with their parents. There's no problems there that some people think that people would have because of spanking.
It's just common. I saw some people in my culture started this idea that spanking is bad, started to seep into our culture. They're like, I'm afraid to spank my kid because people might judge me or this and that and this and that. Their kids got out of control. I said, Listen, it's okay to spank your kids. There's nothing wrong with this. This is good. This is fine. People have been doing it. I mean, it's been common throughout history for forever. This is a relatively new thing not to spank your kids. It's been common throughout history forever. Throughout history, we've had good people. They've all been spanked. You know what I'm saying? Yes, we've had some bad people. They're all spanked. We've had abuse. But the old saying, Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, certainly applies here. We see some abuse, and then we want to run to the other extreme and not do spanking at all. I think that's wrong. I think it's so wrong that we're hurting children who, if they were properly spanked, would turn out great, would do well in school, would not have to be put on ADHD medicine or drugged to death so that they sit quiet.
We wouldn't have out-of-control schools. I think we're really, really hurting society by making this a thing that's taboo when it shouldn't be.
Talking to Hal didn't fully change my mind about spanking. I still haven't done it, and I wouldn't do it. I don't think the data supports spanking, even though it is a difficult question to answer with data for a lot of reasons. First, parents who spank are different from those who do not. If you look at just the raw correlation between spanking and later outcomes, you'll overstate the downsides. Second, even within the group of parents who spank, it stands to reason that children who are more difficult may be spanked more. I will, however, say these final two things about spanking. First, there is no evidence to suggest that spanking is more effective than an approach that relies on timeouts, where there's definitely no evidence of harm. And second, spanking is disproportionately race and class-based in America. In a representative study of kindergarten in the US, 27% of mothers reported spanking their child in the previous week. That was 40% of Black mothers, 28% of Hispanic mothers, 24% of White mothers, and 23% of Asian-American mothers. All of that said, there is a point in what Hal was saying that I actually agree with about the possible unintended and negative consequences of not disciplining our children at all.
After the break, what are some of the consequences? Is gentle or gentler parenting hurting society as much as how claims it is? And what explains the big swing away from harsher or stricter parenting strategies in the last decade? Stay with us. Raising Parents is proudly supported by Airbnb, a company that has made trips with my family time and time again, so exciting and memorable. In Japan, I found an Airbnb in the middle of a small town called Goat House. We were the only tourists for many miles, and in addition to goats, the house also had a Samurai sword. It was amazing to feel, even briefly, like we were living a normal life in a totally different place. What's amazing about Airbnb hosts is you're getting all the local experience instantly. At an Airbnb in Maine, our host recommended a particular swimming pond where you could walk on a hidden path and jump off cliffs. Needless to say, we were alone there and we couldn't have felt more like locals. Here's the really cool thing. While you're away, your home could also be an Airbnb. And yes, that means you can actually make cash while you're on vacation.
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I think that our whole conversation about this topic of spanking is really extreme. I don't think there's any topic that people are more so-called triggered by in the world of parenting than spanking.
This is Abigail Schreier, an independent journalist who most recently wrote Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up.
But I know we're living in a context where if you even mention spanking, you get a very extreme reaction, and we regard it as a source of trauma. There just isn't good evidence that it produces traumatic injury in general. Well, let me just say, I'm not an advocate for spanking. It's not like I think this is a wonderfully efficacious truel. I haven't seen evidence of that, so I'm not an advocate of it. But do I think it produces traumatic injury? I haven't seen evidence of that either. But it is true in a society in which we all assume that it causes traumatic injury, then yes, we are likely to see people who think they've been traumatically injured by it.
What do you think happened to change the attitudes in this way? I think 30 years ago, if somebody had said, or 40 years ago, you had said, I spank my kids. That would not have been perceived in the way that it is now, at least in a lot of places. I'm curious, what do you think is the change there?
Well, we can describe this change in a few ways, but parents got much more involved in raising their kids in terms of time and attention and where that attention was placed. We became moms and dads, men and women, became much more... They poured many more hours into child rearing or parenting. One of the One of the things we decided we were going to do for various reasons is be there to attend to every emotional bit of distress our kids felt. We decided our goal as parents was to make sure our kids never sat with distress, never felt unsupported, even for short periods of time, and even the slightest period of time. That's why it became harder and harder for us to ever punish a child, because, of course, if you punish a child, no matter what the punishment is, They're going to be upset with you. I think as parents, we had a much harder time riding out our kids' displeasure.
Can you describe some of what you call in the book a perfectly average markers of an '80s childhood?
Well, I think this was the latchkey kid generation. Kids often came home to an empty house that wasn't considered neglect or a reason to call child services. That was just what happened. Parents weren't home from work yet. Parents did not show up at every sports game, let alone every practice. There was no expectation that parents would attend every single game. You would get cut from a team. If you weren't good at it or good enough at that team, you would get cut, and that was that. If you scored higher, you'd be in the high class, and if you didn't, you'd be in the lower class, and that you just lived with. There were all kinds of indignities of childhood, either being made fun of, no one called that bullying, they just called it being made fun of or being teased. Look, some of it was really unpleasant. I mean, especially if you look back at things like, say, the way gay teenagers were treated, the language that was used could be really awful. A certain amount of that went along with a general toleration of discomfort. Now, I certainly don't want to just go back, dial the clock back.
A lot of that was really cruel and unnecessary. Making fun of kids for racial, cultural, ethnic features, sexual orientation, whatever, is really beyond the pale. But there wasn't a sense that anything that hurt your feelings or any emotional injury would be debilitating and you would live with it for life and that you needed now a therapy or a pill to handle your life. That there wasn't the sense of. I think that the general resilience culture of knock it off, shake it off, you'll live, those things we used to say, sticks in stones may break my bones, those kinds of things, they did communicate a message of you're going to be fine. And in general, most kids are. But does it feel bad? Does it feel bad in hindsight that our feelings weren't always supported? Sure. But the question is, is that are we way exaggerating the injury and exaggerating just how many times we need to be there to support and affirm and accommodate our kids? And are we in the process making them weaker? And I think we are. I think we threw out way too much of the '80s childhood.
I think this is, to me, the most interesting thing that came out of all of these conversations is the distinction between the boundaries and the consequences. In particular, I think everybody we have talked to is in agreement that authoritative parenting is the appropriate version of this. Where the disagreement seems to come, and I'm curious how you would land on this, is the question of whether you can have boundary setting without consequences. Is it possible to set boundaries without consequences?
No, because I don't think you're really setting a boundary at all. What you're doing is you're turning yourself into a slave to the child. I'll tell you something else. I think that These scripts for parents are terribly unhelpful. The therapeutic scripts, say to a child, I'm setting a boundary. Say to a child, I can see that your feelings are very bad. They come with consequences. And what the consequence is, is I'm no longer being your parent. I'm no longer being someone you know as mom or dad or whatever you call me. I'm now pretending to be a therapist because those are the ultimate authority in this house. I need to ape their expert techniques with my own child. Now, I don't think their techniques are terribly expert. I think they have very unimpressive results. But more importantly, the fact that they're going around giving parents these incredibly artificial scripts and introducing this real falseness in the parent-child relationship, I think is a negative thing.
Where does All of this leave us. First of all, there is no approach to toddler discipline that is perfect. Sorry, there are multiple choices here, and you need to choose what works for your family. Like my mom's experience with my My mother and me, and my own experience with my two children, that solution may differ by child. That said, I think there are some important takeaways that everyone I talk to, from Dr. Becky to Dr. Falen, agrees on. One, the parent is the authority. Dr. Falen talked about how your home is not a democracy. Dr. Becky talked about setting boundaries by embodying authority. Hal Chaffee made clear that he sets the rules of engagement. At the same time, they all rejected the idea of the parent as the authoritarian dictator. Even Hal Chaffee was clear, I'm not the dictator. In this way, all these approaches are trying to be a form of authoritative parenting, where the parent is the authority and is firm, but is still warm and loving. Second, consistency. Whatever approach you take, you need to implement it the same every time. Kids need to know what to expect. The final thing that everyone agreed on is that parents should not get angry.
And beyond that, that families need an approach to behavior which they can implement without anger. Don't yell is a shared theme. Don't punish in anger. This not getting angry may be the hardest thing of all to implement. And for me, this is where the rubber meets the road. When I think about the biggest concerns I have with spanking, one of them is what happens when parents do get angry. On the other side of the coin, a common concern I hear from parents about gentle parenting, however they define it, is that it's gentle parent, gentle parent, gentle parent, yell. The time that it takes to use talk to get your child to learn skills can feel like too much. If we rely only on the data, the approach with the best empirical support is the one, two, three magic style that Dr. Falen discusses. The approach which is most associated with worsened outcomes is physical discipline. But none of this evidence looks far into the future. Some of it struggles with correlation versus causation. We have literally nothing empirical which would test a strong boundary-setting approach relative to a timeout or consequence at least one. Good luck.
Just kidding. In the end, much of this comes down to what approach you can consistently implement with your child without getting mad. That's going to vary across families. It may vary across kids within a family. Promoting a happy and well-functioning home is not one size fits all. You might have to mix and match. Find an approach or a balance of approaches that feels like it fits your family and that you can do mostly without getting mad. It's about what works for you, not the latest fad. Finally, please don't let this take over your life. I have found in my many years of talking to parents that disciplined approaches can all-consuming. This is perhaps more true with gentle parenting than other methods. Because gentle parenting approaches typically take much more time, it can feel like all you're doing with your kids is discussing their behavior. The goal of these systems is to create a calm and happy family where you can prioritize fun and connection when you're together. So don't overthink it. Sometimes, just put in earplugs. Thanks for listening. Raising Parents is a production in partnership with the Free Press. It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Jansen.
Thanks as well to producers Tamar Avashai, Sam Deer, and Kieran Sampoff for additional production support. The executive producer is Candice Cohn. Last, thanks to my guests today, Dr. Tom Phalen, Dr. Becky Kennedy, Hal Traffie, and Abigail Schreier. I'm Emily Oster. See you next time on Raising Parents.