Learning About Children’s Behavior

There’s an irony about small children’s behavior: the more worried you are about it and the harder you try to change it, the worse it’s liable to get.

That’s because children are easiest to live with when adults take a positive approach to their behavior, assuming that they mean well, noticing when they do well, making sure they mean well, noticing when they do well, making sure they understand what is wanted of them under different circumstances and rewarding good behavior so as to motivate more of the same. Parents who decide that their children are especially badly behaved, or are told so by relatives and caregivers, risk slipping into a negative way of handling them that’s the opposite of all that. Negative discipline focuses on bad behavior, expects it, watches for it, punishes it, so as to motivate change, but gets more – and more and more of the same.

The idea of formal punishment sits better with “discipline” than with “learning how to behave.” Older people, who know how they should behave but do not always want to do so, may sometimes be kept from transgression by its cost – detention for talking in class or getting the car towed for illegal parking. Such considerations don’t always work for us, though, and don’t every work for young children because they aren’t yet able to weigh future penalties against present impulses. The only sanction that works at all reliably with children under four, or even five, is other people’s disapproval. Whatever punishment you may announce when you get angry, it is your anger that punishes. If that statement makes you laugh because your child is currently putting on a don’t-care-ish front, see through it by considering how differently he would react to a formal punishment (“No ice cream for dinner”) if you announced it in different ways. Tell him, “No ice cream for dinner,” in cheerful, matter-of-fact tones and he is unlikely to blink an eye. (Does he usually have ice cream for dinner? Does he especially want ice cream for dinner? What is he going to get for dinner?) But tell him angrily, “That’s it. Just for that you will get no ice cream for dinner,” and he will probably cry or rage. He may or may not have expected or even wanted ice cream, but he certainly did not want you to be angry with him.

You probably made the angry statement about the ice cream in the (righteous) heat of the moment and it had the desired effect of making your feelings clear. But so would any other statement of those feelings, like “You’re being so silly that I’m simply not enjoying this walk, so we’re going home.” The trouble with the “unique baby girl clothes” version is that by dinnertime the whole argument will probably ne long over and forgotten. In order to stick to your formal guns you have to drag the whole episode up again and, in effect, punish the child a second time. How awkward if he has been especially charming and helpful ever since.

Your disapproval, or anger, is your most effective sanction. If it leads you to immediate and spontaneous “punishment” so that the child can clearly see that his behavior has directly caused it, the punishment may strengthen your point. You will not go on standing in the line for toddler clothes for girls while he behaves so badly, so he doesn’t get the ice cream right now. He has done himself out of it rather than being “punished” for his behavior. You cannot let him go on pulling boxes off of the supermarket shelves so you pick him up and put him in the cart. He has abused his liberty and thus sacrificed it. Are those actions “punishments”? If they were cold and calculated, they would be, and as cold, calculated punishments, they probably wouldn’t work. As heated reactions to immediate situations, though, they are the direct results of the child’s own ill-advised actions. And that’s the one and only kind of punishment that may work.