His six-year-old son insists that he wants to play soccer in his living room, with the latent possibility of destroying vases and windows; Then you stand firm, and with your face as serious as his facial muscles allow, you threaten to punish him.
The next day, his little offspring from hell refuses to do his schoolwork, and you again threaten to punish him Later, he seems determined to bother his younger sister, and you, what a novelty, threaten to punish him.
All of these cases are, of course, fictitious, but they well represent the discipline methodology that many parents use. But, Are punishments really effective? The answer depends on what you intend to achieve with your child.
If what you are looking for is to comply with an order immediately, the strategy will most likely be successful. But in that case, your child will be agreeing to what you ask of him out of fear, for fear of punishment; not because I respect him as a father or because I believe that doing so is the right thing to do.
Implicitly, you will be teaching the child that problems are solved through the threat or exercise of power And that the best way to get people to do things is to put fear under their skin.
Jonathan Freedman’s experiment
An astute psychologist named Jonathan Freedman conducted an interesting experiment that illustrates the above point. He went to a school where he took a group of children and took them, one by one, to a special room where there were several cheap toys and tricks, among which stood out a fantastic robot full of lights and gadgets that was controlled by remote control.. In this context, He told the child that he had to leave the room for a few minutes.and that in the meantime, he could play with any of the toys, except the robot.
“If you touch the robot, then I will find out and I will be very, very angry,” he told him with his best ogre face. She then left the room and watched what the boy was doing through a mirrored glass. Obviously, almost all the children who underwent the experiment made an effort to control their impulses and avoided approaching the robot.
In the second condition of the same experiment, Freedman simply told the children that while he was gone for a few moments, they could entertain themselves by playing, but that “it was not okay for them to play with the robot.” In this case, he did not resort to threats of any kind, he simply assured them that it was not correct to touch the robot. On this occasion, as on the previous one, practically all the children avoided approaching the robot, and They settled for the other unattractive toys..
The effect of the absence of authority
But the interesting thing is what happened a little more than a month later. Freedman sent a collaborator to the same school to repeat the same sequence with the same children, both from one group and the other. Only this time, when the woman had to leave the room, she said absolutely nothing to the children. In other words, they were free to do whatever they wanted.
What happened turned out to be absolutely surprising and revealing. The boys in the first group, who a month earlier had avoided playing with the robot by complying with an external order issued by a frowning adult, that adult not being present now and with the threat consequently gone, they felt free to play with the forbidden toy.
On the contrary, the boys in the second group, even though Freadman was not present, did exactly the same as the previous occasion, and stayed away from the flashy robot. In the absence of an external threat, in the first place, it seemed that they had developed their own, internal arguments, which justified why they should not play with the robot.
Maybe so convinced that it was their decision, and not someone else’s arbitrary imposition, they felt inclined to act in a manner consistent with their beliefs. These children, freed from external pressures, assumed responsibility for their own actions, probably feeling that they were the ones who voluntarily chose what they wanted to do.
The importance of motivation
The moral is clear: both punishments and rewards constitute external motivations that do not generate long-term commitment, with the desired behavior disappearing as soon as the desired consequence disappears.
In everyday life, many times I have been able to observe with my own eyes, how some parents, even worse, punish their children. forcing them to do homework or read a book, creating the false notion that these activities are in themselves bad, unpleasant and worth avoiding. In return, they reward them with more hours of television and video games, reinforcing the idea that these activities are desirable and have a great power of gratification.
Yes, dear readers. It is common in these times for our children to grow up believing that reading is contemptible and should be avoided at all costs, and watching television is the path to pleasure and personal success. If you are the parent of a small child, or plan to be one soon, I urge you to do things properly: educate him based on a minimum set of moral criteria if you want him to eventually become a good adult. You don’t need more than that. Do not teach him to obey just for fear of punishment
At some point, if you are lucky, you will become old. Don’t complain if your historically bullied child has now become a spiteful adult, and you decide to put him in a seedy nursing home, or send him on vacation to Ethiopia in the middle of summer.
