Paid Subscriber Bonus: Why are we so obsessed with punishing children?
Whether it's spanking, or "gentle" methods like timeout and taking away toys, why have we accepted that the only way to change children's behavior is to punish them?
In my twenties, I was a nanny. I vividly recall another nanny in my nanny support group telling us the story of the eighteen month old she cared for. He hit her, so she put him in timeout in his crib.
He cried. He screamed. He yelled. He hyperventilated. She didn’t let him out until he stopped expressing emotion. Except she called it not letting him out until he could “behave.” She was confident she had taught him an important lesson.
I didn’t think much of that story at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot now that I have my own 18 month old. She likes to scratch my chest while she nurses. And sometimes, if I take her hand and tell her no, she hits me. She thinks it’s funny. Because to a baby who has no understanding of right and wrong, it is funny. She’s experimenting with the world around her, not being cruel.
That 18 month old my friend nannied kept hitting her. No one ever suggested that perhaps punishment wasn’t working, that perhaps someone actually needed to teach him how to behave instead, that perhaps isolating him alone while he was upset and making him even more upset was making things worse.