7 Old-fashioned Discipline Techniques You Should Avoid At All (on primary school kids)

Red: corporate punishment is illegal at home, Source

2. Shaming

Compare with corporal punishment, shaming happens quietly without any bruise. If you curtail your kids behavior though negative thoughts and words. As a parent, it’s easy to slip into shaming your child as you just blurt out your thoughts. Some daily examples of shaming are:

• “Stop crying, it is not that bad”
• “Why did not you get straight A”
• “You let me down again”
• “You selfish boy”

Shaming is very common, and is considered to be acceptable. As parents, we tend to resort to shaming when we feel overwhelmed, irritated or frustrated, and we feel the need to control our children. Until very recently little consideration has been given to its harmful effects.

Children who are shamed regularly grow more resentful toward their parents, and instead of a change in their behavior, their self-confidence is damaged. They cannot get out of their shame for themselves and are unable to make healthy choices in their future. Instead of shaming, go for, ‘I’d like to know what happened’ ‘Can I help you with it?’ ‘Think about how you would have done it differently.’

How to prevent shaming?

Before criticize your kids, think about the following two questions.

• Is this something they can change?
• Is it important that they change it?

If the answer to either question is no, then there is nothing to criticize. Don’t jeopardize or harm your relationship with your child, and don’t waste your time or energy.

3. Comparing siblings

In the past, elders also love to compare their children to get their desired result. Children get comments like “It would be good if you are a little bit like your older brother,” “Look how your younger brother eats his dinner, and you can’t even sit properly!” or “Your older sister always brought excellent results and look at your report own grades”.

This method doesn’t effective in the long term. Every child in the house has a different personality and needs. If one of your children is ready to correct his misbehavior by using positive reinforcement, maybe the other one needs something else and learns things differently or slowly.

It is not okay to compare siblings to discipline them, as it will only encourage sibling rivalry, rebelliousness in your child, and a drive to misbehave more in the future to infuriate the parents.

4. Long-term grounding

“You are grounded for a month!” Parents often use these words when they are angry and frustrated because their child misbehaved or has broken a house rule. While understandable, the anger felt at that moment takes away your logical thinking, and you resort to this method to end the situation, hoping that your child will behave better next time.

You are thinking wrong. Although age-appropriate grounding for children is effective, long-term grounding becomes ineffective. Even if they are in their rooms, they have their electronic devices to pass the time, and they don’t exactly think about their misconduct. Some kids even like to spend more time in their rooms anyway.

It leads to hiding and keeping secrets from parents in fear of being grounded instead of correcting the behavior. Instead, talk to your child and try to find the real reason behind their behavior and what should the proper method be to improve the situation.

5. Sending them to read

This is a sort of punishment that almost everyone has received. Parents’ favorite line to say whenever they encountered non-ideal behavior in their children was, ‘Go to your room and read. I’ll be checking on you’. To be honest, I use it yesterday as well.

The child removed from the situation for the time being, but it is not right to associate the feeling of punishment with reading. Reading should be of their own free joyful will and not a source of discipline. Instead of thinking about their mistake and what they should have done differently, they feel reading is a burden to them and continues to fidget.

6. Over controlling/Banning playtime

Playing outside in a park or the house’s backyard is something kids genuinely enjoy. Kids must have some free time out in nature and away from all the technology as it positively affects their physical and mental health. But sometimes parents resort to controlling this time to discipline them.

Taking away a privilege such as a playtime for a specific amount of time may be an effective method, but forbidding it for too long loses its effect. Children turn to other sources like electronic devices for entertainment, which is not ideal and doesn’t improve their behavior.

Also, frequently stopping them from their physical playtime affects their mental and physical growth and increases stress, ultimately affecting their behavior.

7. Yelling and threatening

The most common discipline strategy used out there is yelling. Parents used to think that the more they raised their voices, the more children would listen to them. To believe that obedience is connected to yelling is an entirely wrong assumption.

When often done, children become used to it and learn to tune out their parents. They know how much they can get away with their parents as they are now aware of their parents’ snapping points.

Threats often accompany yelling. For example, ‘If you are not doing your homework right now, I will take away all your toys.’ Sometimes you may get instant results from threats, but when used repeatedly without any real consequences, children become aware that they are just empty threats and don’t take them into account. This approach is certainly not helpful in improving their behavior and should be avoided.

Final thoughts

Disciplining every child is different as not every method applies to all of them, and when we have so much data from experts and online, the confusion gets to another level. We may have some good examples in our elders, but not all of them are ideal for our children to be used.

They may get you your desired results for the time being, but they have a long-lasting negative influence on your child’s physical and mental development. Instead, search for more productive methods where children can learn something along with correcting their behavior.

If they continue to have issues with their behavior, consult your pediatrician to avoid future problems.

About Me

Hi, there. I am Lin. Together with my husband and two kids, we live in the beautiful Netherlands in Europe. I am dedicated to self-development, creating quality time for the whole family, and fully supporting kids with their potentials and possibilities with all I have learned from engineering, MBA, and 10+ years of working experience in the energy sector.