Punishing your kids behaviour might just make them worse

The most important influence on your young child’s view of themselves is you. As they grow they get an increasingly detailed self-image; who they are what they are good at and what they are not, whether they are a good kid or a problematic one etc.

The most important influence on their view of themselves and, subsequently, how they behave switches from being your voice to the voice inside their head. If you want your child to be well-behaved then that voice needs to be telling them they are a good kid who does good things.

The difficulty with punishments is that it feeds the opposite mentality.

Your child is likely to think,  “if the person who loves me the most is deliberately doing things to make me suffer, I must be really bad.” If that’s what they think they will expect themselves to do bad things. Behaviour is likely to get worse rather than better. The possible exception is if we can make the punishment such a misery that they won’t want to repeat the bad behaviour.

The challenge with that is, instituting such a severe penalty cannot help but diminish the relationship between ourselves and the child, and one of the main reasons our children will do the right thing is because they love/like us so much and they want to do the right thing by us. Diminishing that bond decreases their motivation to do the right thing. The likely result is more poor behaviour.

Our alternative strategy is do everything we can to have their self-image include a very clear picture that of how well-behaved they are. The way we do that is to highlight when they do the right thing, so if they are prone to lose their temper and be violent, things like:

“Hey, its been half an hour and you have had complete control of your temper. I knew you could do it! Well done!”

Then

“Hey, an hour already and you have been so calm. I’m so proud of you.”

Then

“2 hours of perfect behaviour. You are being so mature in the way that you are in charge of your behaviour”

Then

“3 hours and you have been so in control. You must be so proud of yourself!”

And so it goes on.

You will need to decide how often you use this positive psychology in this fashion. It is only necessary to be as regular as indicated in extreme cases. More likely, it could be after a do or two, but it needs to be regular while you try to establish new ways of behaving.

One more thing -  it you can’t just tell them they are a good boy if that is not their perception:

When they say:

“Why don’t you just give up on me. I’m a bad person. I’ve always been a bad person. You’re wasting your time.”

DON’T TELL THEM – “NO, you’re a good person”.

You are telling them the opposite of what they think to be true. You lose credibility. They won’t trust you.

Tell them –

“Gee whiz. You think that because you do some bad things, that you are a bad person. That must be really hard for you. You know, I see you do these ……………………….. (good things) and I believe that you have real good in you”.

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