Articles
August 2005
Where I'm From
Nemours and Effective Discipline
by Jim Allen
As I sat in my doctor’s waiting room a couple of weeks ago, I thumbed through a magazine (Woman’s Day or Family Circle are usually the only reading in there after the pharmaceutical pamphlets) and an article from the Nemours Foundation caught my eye. Now, this is a wonderful group of people and they do a fantastic job of funding children’s hospitals and supporting important clinical research aimed at improving health care for infants, children, and teens. It’s just that Mr. DuPont came from parents who had a different approach to child rearing …he ain’t where I’m from.
Let me give you some examples:
Nemours- Timeouts can be an effective discipline. A child who has been unruly should be told why that behavior is unacceptable and taken to a designated timeout area - a kitchen chair or bottom stair – for one minute for each year of the child’s age.
Reality- Explanation of why our behavior should change: “If you ever do that again I might snatch a knot in your neck!; knock you into next week!; or slap the taste out of your mouth!” ‘Timeouts’ were times spent outside (hours, not minutes) after school or on Saturday cleaning ditches, hands-on septic tank repair or hoeing what seemed like ten miles of lima beans.
Nemours- As your child begins to understand the connection between actions and consequences, make sure you begin to communicate the rules of your family’s home. It’s important to explain to kids what you expect of them before you punish them for a certain behavior.
Reality- “This is MY house and as long as you live under MY roof, you’re gonna do what I tell you to do! You know better than to paint your cousin Judy’s cat. It just now got to where it’ll come out from under the house after ya’ll wrapped him up in duct tape. Why can’t you be like a normal human being instead of some lunatic! Grab a shovel and let’s go look at this ditch.”
Nemours- Consistency is the key to effective discipline. It’s important for parents to decide together what the rules are and then be consistent in upholding them.
Reality- Yep. Every single time, if you screwed up at our house, depending on which one of them caught you, you were gonna get it.
Nemours- Be careful not to make unrealistic threats of punishment. If you threaten to turn the car around and go home if the squabbling in the backseat doesn’t stop, make sure you do exactly that.
Reality- Go home! They’d threaten to put us out…and we knew they meant it!
Nemours- It’s important to not spank, hit, or slap a child of any age. They will only feel the pain of the hit. Rather than teaching children how to change their behavior, spanking makes them fearful of their parents and teaches them merely to avoid getting caught.
Reality- Imagine yourself in this predicament:
You’re eleven years old. Your brother is nine. A family friend’s daughter is thirteen and sitting between the two of you in the back seat of a Ford Fairlane on a steamy hot Friday night at a drive-in theater outside of Houston, Texas. Your mother and her friend are glued to the big screen on the front seat. It’s two hours past your bedtime, you’ve been in the ocean most of the day and you’re sunburned. You’re about half way through Gone With The Wind (the absolute longest movie ever made) and haven’t the foggiest what’s going on other than you don’t want to be in that car and you sure don’t want to be touched by either of the people on the seat with you.
Popcorn is somehow spilled and a fight breaks out just as Scarlet and Rhett’s daughter has her riding accident. With clinched teeth like I’d never seen before, Momma turned around and swatted all three of us on the legs– Pop, Pop, Pop– like a machine gun. The Nemours folks were right, we did feel pain and we were pretty much afraid of her at that moment.
We settle down for a while. I climbed into the back window space and my brother leans on the door. I can’t remember if he touched my leg or if I kicked him in the head…the Nemours people were wrong because we had no where to run to avoid getting caught when the fight broke out the second time. This time it was the other lady’s turn to flail us, followed by my mother and then both of them at once, like a tag team match at a wrestling match. I’m just glad they didn’t have folding chairs.
When all the whooping (spanking) was over and we’d all about cried out, we went to sleep and Momma and her friend finished the last five or so hours of the movie with us perhaps a little more respectful, but certainly not fearful, of our elders.
