metaphortunate | calling M. Foucault, M. Foucault come in please

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junebug

calling M. Foucault, M. Foucault come in please

Mr. E had a visit with a friend of his this week. Said friend has kids older than the Junebug, and as they were talking shop, as parents will do, the friend asked if we had any thoughts on discipline. Because at this point, apparently it is hard to take the kids over to anyone's houses because they do not hear the word "no" and that turns out to not be very much fun.

This is not a situation I want to find myself in four years from now. But I don't really know what to do about it. This is one reason I've loved the baby stage: you don't have to discipline a baby. Babies do what they gotta do. Older kids, I know you have to actually train and stuff - but I have no idea how.

Parents of kids older than babies - what have you done about discipline? Has it worked? Did you try different things? What did you start with, and when did you start, and how has your approach changed as the kids have gotten older?

I'm turning on anonymous comments on this one.

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Initially: Physical removal from situations where the kid couldn't control him/herself. Later (possibly by around 2, though it's hard to remember) time-outs. Still later, loss of privileges, though that was/is usually when there was a privilege coming up soon because otherwise it doesn't make much of an impression given their time horizons.

Our two kids had/have very different levels of testing boundaries. The time-outs took a long time to make much of an impression on our daughter, but I think they eventually worked. But it's hard to say--so much seems to depend on the particularities of the kid.

Physical removal starts working early and continues working for many years, but I started accompanying it with "You may not X" fairly early (maybe 6 months?) because I believed in explaining, trying to implant the value of logic and analysis. I also have a very firm "mother face" and "mother voice" according to my kids--I had absolute certainty that they were going to do what I asked, and I was mostly right. Tantrums resulted in an immediate removal from the situation (we'd go stay in the car if out and about) and other than safety supervision I ignored them when they were having a tantrum.

Time-outs other than tantrum removals never worked with my kids--they wanted time alone, they'd just play (there is, after all, an assumption in time-outs that the child craves social time). I was matter-of-fact about what I didn't like, with words and actions. Never spanked or yelled, and if I was angry I explained that it was at the situation, not the person.

I think other than basic socialization of the animal (e.g. toileting, using table utensils) I mostly used praise of behavior I wanted to see again. And I taught respect, things as simple and complex as not having to hug or kiss relatives unless they wanted to, having their own things that were left alone, giving them as many choices as I could manage (from what clothing to wear to what and how much to eat, what hobbies to pursue, etc.) and respect of me (I don't talk through the bathroom door, for example).

Some worked, some didn't. One of my sons lied to me constantly and, I suspect, still does--but he didn't know then that I saw right through him on some of it. He did fool me about some, more into his teen years.

The more I read about human development, the less I think I changed them. I gave opportunities for good to develop and express, and reinforced that, but I don't think I was at all successful in stopping them doing things I didn't want past the age of reason (between 8 and 10).

At first, we just said no. The earthling listened. (I also did specific things early on - like, I taught him to be gentle with me while we were nursing, because I didn't like being pulled on or scratched.) We also did physical removal and sort of - gentle ignoring? Like, I'm not mad or anything, but if you're going to have a tantrum, I'll just sit here and read until you're calmer.

At two, no stopped working all the time, so we went to 1-2-3 Magic, which is a book. The tone of the book is unspeakably horrible, but the basic concept works for us. (Emotionless counting, essentially. The kid gets to three and then gets a time out - one minute for each year of age. The keys are consistency, always doing the time out, and staying emotionless; the more you react, the less well it works.) We still use that, although we get to three very, very rarely these days. (The first few days I did it, the earthling got timed out about fifteen times a day, because he wanted to see how it worked. Once he figured it all out, he was good with it.) More often, the earthling will time himself out - "I need moment! I need moment!" or "I need time out, please." Or he'll just go off somewhere for a few minutes to deal.

I don't think of the time outs as punishment; I think of them as reset time, partly because that's so obviously how the earthling is using them. He has a hard time getting himself under control when there are people around, which is why he times himself out. (You can see this. When he knows he's about to lose it, he'll duck behind furniture, even, and come out a few minutes later calmed down.) He can also redirect himself much more easily when people are not around. So what happens is, he goes into his room and either plays for four minutes or sits on the carpet for four minutes, and then he comes out, and we don't speak of it again. Basically, the time out is a fresh start for all of us. (Sometimes I need the time out more than he does.)

If we're out and about, or if there's another consequence that makes more sense than a time out, I let him know about that when I count him the first time. ("That's one for throwing. If you get to three, the toy will go on break.")

At around three and a half, we also started using counting down from ten. This is when I want him to do something (counting 1, 2, 3 is only for *stopping* something) important and he's being dilatory. (So, like, I ask, then I remind, then I count down.) He'll hurry to do whatever he knows he's supposed to be doing. It gives him a time limit that he can understand (I mean, I can also use the timer on my phone, but that's pretty complicated for, like, getting his shoes on) and a reminder of what he's supposed to be doing. Also, I can vary the speed of the counting so that he has enough time to do whatever it is. He doesn't necessarily like it much, but it works. (Often he'll say to me, "I'm doing it! I'm doing it! Don't count me!" if he's been delaying but he knows I'm about to start counting down from ten.)

And that's as far as I've gotten! So far, numbers have worked for me - counting up, counting down. Or, okay, that plus being consistent and also having an easy kid has worked for me. We're very lucky, both that the earthling is (so far) such an easy kid, and also that before we had our easy kid, we had the world's smartest Labrador retriever, who pushed every boundary and set every limit. Her reign of adorable terror taught us to be consistent and follow the fuck through. I thank her basically every day; she made parenting so much easier.

Oh, I forgot something that worked really well for us when the earthling was younger: talking as if the desired behavior has already happened. So, like, I do my best to avoid getting in a contest of strength with the earthling - he'll always lose, that's not fair, and it just teaches him that might makes right. So I don't want to yank things out of his hands (unless they are, like, actively dangerous or on fire or whatever). Instead, when he was younger, I would hold out my hand and say, "Thank you!" And he would give it to me. Or when we needed to move on (he was soooooo obsessed with fire extinguishers that we had this problem approximately every fifteen feet indoors for at least a year), I would say, "Bye-bye, fire extinguisher!" And he would move on without having to be dragged away.

And obviously all of these strategies are sometimes strategies. Reading this over, it sort of sounds to me like I am spending all of my time counting. I'm not. But there are many occasions when things HAVE TO HAPPEN, either because time or because safety, and the counting strategies help all of us stay on an even keel.

With toddler at age 2.25, that kind of sympathetic magic works for us as well. "Bye-bye, neighbors!"

my two are both extremely stubborn, busy and hardheaded, but thank goodness they weren't randomly destructive or mean. And they weren't biters, thank goodness. So that made some things a bit easier.

In the toddler stage, we childproofed EVERYTHING so that we weren't having to redirect them away from things all the time. There were no off limits places in the house except certain parts of the kitchen. And we dialed back the rules to the basics -- no hitting, sit in the car seat, hold my hand when you cross the street, etc. The very basic safety rules. Because the key is, you can't back down once you set a limit. Ever.

Another key is to remain unmoved by tantrums. I once left a full grocery cart in the grocery store when I had to take the kid out for throwing himself on the floor and screaming for ice cream. You just can't give in. We had peanut butter sandwiches for dinner and I shopped the next day.

We used time outs for hitting or refusing to take turns. Physically removing the kids from the site of the bad behavior was usually our first line of defense.

Good luck! There are a lot of great books out there. "How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids will Talk" saved my life. It's so wise. It recommends consequences not punishment, a subtle yet crucial distinction.

This and the one TFV mentioned are GREAT complements to one another that are full of good advice. I also love what Snippy said, above, about praise and encouraging the good in them. Basically, you're less disciplining them than you are communicating your value system and teaching them good coping strategies. So at 5/6, when R had trouble, we would have him go to his room "until he calmed down." We would ask him if he needed a hug, and reassure him that we always have hugs for him. I would make him think of ways he could handle a situation better and tell me or write them down. We talked a lot about how to keep yourself calm. It didn't always work - you know our ups and downs - but we stuck it out, to the extent that when he was not permitted playtime, we actually got babysitters and went out without him sometimes, and yes, I have had social and other situations where I turned around and left someplace I had just gotten to, or cancelled something at the last minute, because of his poor behavior. It's SO UNPLEASANT, but we are having to do it less now, so...yay? I think one of the most important things is to be clear with kiddo that you are disciplining because the BEHAVIOR is unacceptable, not because the kid is bad - we drew that line early and reinforce often.

We've been trying "unconditional parenting", which is interesting but quite difficult, mindset-wise. The best thing about it so far is watching our son learn a lot of self-control behaviors -- because we demo them, and they end up calming us down in stressful times, too.

Which is not to say that we don't occasionally end up yelling or doing time-outs, because unconditional parenting is not something we grew up with at all. (it is not consequence-free parenting, like some people think, but it is low-to-no-discipline parenting.)

Besides Alfie Kohn's "unconditional parenting", we've found Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman's "Nurture Shock" interesting and thought-provoking, in terms of what sorts of discipline do and don't work and in what situations and why children do certain things.

Oh my God, I have such admiration for anyone who can parent like Kohn recommends. Like, how do you get dressed and SHOES on in the morning? How do you make sure they EAT when it is EATING TIME? How do you get teeth brushed? Showers/baths? Homework? I believe in what Kohn says, but I don't know how to DO it - so much of life is a compliance activity, and we have things that need to get done by a certain time, etc.

Tips?

I think the answer is, one messes up a lot, because it's such a different mindset and because, as you say, a lot of life is a compliance activity.

I try to re-read sections of the book frequently to internalize suggestions more -- most recently I re-read the bit on pseudochoice and on what to do when you have to take away autonomy (like, yeah, get your shoes on/teeth brushed etc), because I've had to take away a fair amount of autonomy lately (sorry, kid, but you actually CANNOT throw hard metal toys at the baby's head). I work really hard on being warm, caring, and regretful about causing the kid to lose autonomy and not blaming him for acting in a developmentally appropriate manner. And I screw up a lot. And I spend a fair amount of time thinking that maybe Kohn is just a nutty nut guy who's nuts.

I've found my particular child (not the baby, the older one, obviously) is fairly responsive to things like "I know you don't want to do X. It's not much fun, is it? But X is one of those things that you just have to do in life, even when you don't want to. We all have to do things we don't want to do sometimes. Let's do it and then later we can do something more fun without worrying."

I imagine that doesn't work as well with all kids, though. But R really responds to straightforwardness about how I know he doesn't want to do a thing, especially if I can give him an empathy-based reason for it -- like, I just got him into his afternoon quiet time, which he didn't want, by telling him I knew he didn't want quiet time but that I was tired and needed a break, and quiet time was really to help me be calmer. I didn't expect him to accept that explanation but he did so quite readily.

I will freely admit that we had a lot of help simply by virtue of the fact that she was in daycare for large chunks of the day. We noticed she was saying things like, "No no don't," or "I don't like it" at certain stages, and we reinforced their language just because it seemed to work. We used time outs, and still do. Now we use loss of privileges, although for a long time we were hampered by the fact that there was a time delay that would keep her from connecting the behavior to the loss. Now...God, she's weirdly cheerful about delayed punishments. She'll remind me she doesn't get cartoons that day.

Honestly, we're helped by the fact that she's basically a good kid, because she's also very smart and devious. If she really tried to misbehave in ways more serious than using up my trial-size Nivea, we'd be doomed.

As someone who has dealt with a lot of other people's toddlers,

1) Do your best to be consistent about discipline, even if it causes social awkwardness. If you have to interrupt a conversation you're having to pick him up and say whatever you need to say to him, do it. If you've got to remove him from a situation, do it; if you say, "We're going straight home if you don't stop X," and he doesn't stop X, go straight home. Kids will absolutely notice when you're inconsistent, and they will start testing your limits.

If whoever you're talking to gets offended that you interrupted your conversation to raise your child, you definitely have my permission to flip them off.

2) Do your best not to come undone yourself when he cries or tantrums, or at least not to let him see that you're upset. Don't get visibly mad or scared, even if you feel you've got reason for it. If he's hurt/upset, doing this can start a feedback loop, and if he just wants attention, you're letting him know that crying is a tool he can use to get a reaction. I'm not saying to be dismissive, just to be calm.

(This message brought to you by the mother of a student I nicknamed "Mr. Weepy."

By the way, the kids called me "ijiwaru sensei," which means basically "Miss Meanie.")

3) This feels like kind of a weird thing to say, but you should never take it personally when he's bad. I've known parents who got seriously upset with their kids for acting up, because they seem to take it as a betrayal of some kind of trust. This is silly.

Reacting this way assumes that the kid understands social situations like an adult, which he/she really does not, even if he sometimes seems to. That's why he/she's throwing rocks at other kids/covering the water fountain with mud/whatever in the first place. Kids are obliged to act up because it's how they learn what's okay and what's not. Basically, if he's never bad, he never learns what bad is. I feel like building up a moral/social system is a lot like building up an immune system.

If a parent tells you that their kid is always good, then that parent is delusional. Even my absolute best students had off days (and their parents were never the ones who thought their kids were angels). If he's too good, observe him carefully for anomalous behaviour around cornfields.

if you say, "We're going straight home if you don't stop X," and he doesn't stop X, go straight home.

I've also found that going straight to the nuclear option (like, "straight home") works much less well than staging it out; my kid would get so hysterical at the thought of having to go home that his behavior would get worse.

Going to "we'll sit down together and count our breathing to calm down" first eliminated 95% of the need to go-straight-home, for us, even though we did spend a bunch of gym classes mostly sitting off to the side together, counting breaths.

I want to reinforce your #3
This feels like kind of a weird thing to say, but you should never take it personally when he's bad
something fierce.

I grew up with parents who took all my errors, failures, tantrums, and second thoughts personally. While she was dying my mother complained about how poorly I treated her when I was 11. The day after she died my father complained about how I'd shamed him by foolish action when I was 12.

The result is decades of therapy and continual doubt that I'm OK. Think of the psychic joy you can bring to Junebug by avoiding this tendency!

Beyond what other people have said--I pretty much always blathered to SteelyKid about what we were doing or going to do, even when she was a baby, because otherwise I felt like I _never talked_, and being in a habit of giving explanations and reasons has I think been useful. Also it helps me pick my battles (can I explain why this is important? No? Then it's not.).

Anyway. Not acting reflexively and paying attention to her reactions have been kind of my meta-principles. Like, arguing from negative future consequences does not work (though we keep trying because *one day*!), but "if you do X with that again I am taking it away" works just fine. She hates count-downs from 10, so we use that for time-sensitive compliance. Happily we haven't needed more than that so far.

+1-ing avoiding emotional pile-ons as much as possible, and verbalizing. When I feel I'm about to lose it, I say, "This is not doing us any good," plus whatever pertains--most recently, "Mama can't hold you right now because you hit me; you sit by yourself for two minutes," and then I stand up and move away. (Generally not for exactly two minutes, yet, though she understands the digital timer on the microwave.) Narrating things from before she could understand all the words/concepts has been useful for us because it means she expects both narrative and conversation, and increasingly, she participates by saying what she wants instead of just crying in frustration. Sometimes it's not what I thought she wanted, and it's something she can have, which is nice....

+1 especially to the importance of being consistent. I'm able to guess a little in advance what some issues will be, discuss them with darkforge, and get consensus that we can implement together, but for some things inevitably we're surprised, and whoever is on the spot has to implement a hopefully not impossible-to-uphold policy and stick to it. And it seems simpler already (~20 months) to assert that we need to do some unwanted things because they're right, they're just what we do, than to make things an if-then seesaw. I try to emphasize positive conceptualizations ("let's clean up these blocks together before we eat") instead of letting them flip negative ("can't eat till the floor's clean").

Narrating things from before she could understand all the words/concepts has been useful for us because it means she expects both narrative and conversation, and increasingly, she participates by saying what she wants instead of just crying in frustration. Sometimes it's not what I thought she wanted, and it's something she can have, which is nice....

Yes, to this & more. My wife is especially good at maintaining the flow of narrative, and I think it's paying off now that the baby is a toddler and it's very much a give-and-take.

This is such a complicated thing for us, right now, because we've got Lu who's three and a half, and KK who's newly two, and it's tough to maintain any kind of consistency when they both respond differently to us (as in, each of us individually, and to different methods of discipline).

We're still searching for things that work. I've read Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting book and it kind of broke me a little - because if punishments don't work, and rewards don't work, really, in the long run, what the hell works?! - and I had to decide that what is important to me is 1) my relationship with my kids and 2) that they internalize a sense of self-decision-making, like, not that they do things just because they're asked/told, but because they can recognize that doing a particular thing is better than the alternative. To this end I talk to them, a lot, lots of "Okay, I know you'd rather throw your toys across the room, but that's not a very nice way to treat your toys and they're liable to break. You'll be able to enjoy them longer if you play gently with them!" and trying to put a positive spin on things, f'rex "Let's make sure we're ready to play outside by getting our clothes on and our teeth brushed!" instead of "No playing outside unless you brush your teeth." It's more a model of working-with instead of dictating-to, I guess, and picking a stance on what things are worth fighting about - time-sensitive things, sure, safety things, sure, but if they want to go to the park instead of the library, or want dessert with their dinner? Eh, why not. I like to let them have choices when they can. I'm also a huge fan of counting, as in, "Okay, you can keep playing for another five seconds, and then I need you to come here so we can change your diaper" and that usually works a charm.

This is harder on my partner, I think, than on me, because I grew up in a household where "because I said so" was more the exception than the norm - my folks were pretty good about having good explanations for why they asked me to do stuff, or not to do stuff, and they were willing to listen and compromise on things that were a matter of preference instead of, say, safety. My partner, otoh, grew up in a navy family where he was pretty much expected to obey his parents, period. So he gets a lot more upset when Lu gets into a defiant mood and just flat-out refuses to do anything we ask.

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