Parenting Without Emotional Punishment

“So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.”

 –Virginia Satir

Emotional Punishment is the default

Most parents use emotional punishment to control their children. The implicit contract is this: if you don’t do what I say, you have to deal with my unpleasant emotions. We don’t know that we’re doing this, it feels like emotional intensity is something that happens to us, not something we strategically deploy.

Ichiro Kishimi illustrates this dynamic in The Courage to Be Disliked:

One day, a mother and daughter were quarreling loudly. Then, suddenly, the telephone rang. “Hello?” The mother picked up the receiver hurriedly, her voice still thick with anger. The caller was her daughter’s homeroom teacher. As soon as the mother realized who was phoning, the tone of her voice changed and she became very polite. Then, for the next five minutes or so, she carried on a conversation in her best telephone voice. Once she hung up, in a moment, her expression changed again and she went straight back to yelling at her daughter.

Unlike children, most adults have the ability to limit the intensity of their emotional expression. When you get angry at your child, there is more intentionality there than you want to admit. We all experienced emotional manipulation from our own parents, so it seems normal to repeat the pattern with our own children.

Alternatives to emotional manipulation

Children get to choose whether they do what their parents want them to do. Previous generations relied on the threat of physical punishment to encourage children to obey. As society moves away from physical punishment, children are more likely to push back against their parents’ wishes.

Modern parents face a new challenge: how do we encourage children to obey without emotional or physical punishment? The short answer is this: overall, most children are likely to be somewhat less obedient without the threat of physical punishment. The long answer is this: parents have to put in more effort, be more creative, and hold onto their own emotions better.

Incentives and Consequences

If you don’t use physical or emotional punishment, you are left with incentives and consequences. Children respond best to incentives that take immediate effect, so parents learn to time-shift rewards so that children can see they’re making progress towards something appealing. The old-fashioned way of doing this is with a “star chart” or some other kind of point-tracking system. You can create a similar system on your phone by using one of the many “tally counter” apps that allow you to track various “tallies.” Each tally can be the number of “points” a child has earned by, for example, putting on their shoes and fastening their seat belts. You can have one tally for each child, and they can see you click + or  - depending on their behavior.

It’s important for children to feel that their parents are firmly in charge.

Childhood anxiety increases when children sense that there is no firm hand at the wheel in their family. Children crave order, structure, and a calm, loving container in which to learn and grow. On a subconscious level they actually want mom and dad to be in charge. Mom and dad also want to be in charge, because it means you can actually get the family in the car and go somewhere together. If you have three children, there is never a time when all three want to put their shoes on and get in the car at the same time. They also don’t want to eat at the same time, go to bed at the same time, or basically do anything at the same time. The family structure requires that someone be in charge.

Parents should operate within the actual limits of their authority

Parents who use emotional punishment are trying to artificially inflate their authority. Children actually get to choose whether they put their shoes on or not, and the parent’s job is to figure out a way to make that happen. Most children want to believe that their parents are in charge, and they will often test their parents’ resolve to see what the power structure actually looks like.

Emotional punishment increases bad behavior

Emotional punishment increases your child’s anxiety, which in turn increases bad behavior. Anxiety drives children to act out in a dozen different ways. Anxious siblings tend to argue or fight with each other. Children experiencing anxiety are less likely to comply with a parent’s requests. Conversely, parents who bring a sense of safety and calm can help their children be more compliant. Children can learn to follow a parent’s instructions as a matter of course. A child who used to associate “put your shoes on and get in the car” with extreme anxiety can learn to see it as no big deal.

Children have limited emotional capacity and rely on adults for soothing, external emotional regulation. When a parent adds their own anxiety into the dynamic, children are likely to act out or check out because their anxiety levels exceed what they can handle.

Emotionally safe parenting requires significant personal development

We don’t get the sudden ability to manage our own emotionality just because we had a kid. Parenting pushes us to become more capable of emotional regulation. Our children will always operate at a fraction of our own emotional skill level. It’s unreasonable to expect any child to exceed their parent’s emotional maturity, but that is exactly what we do when we ask our children to regulate their emotions more skillfully than we do ourselves.

Recommended Reading

Already Free by Bruce Tift

The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi