science

Who says you need punishment at all?

The vast majority of misbehaviour is down to poorly-developed coping skills. Which kids have, because, y'know, they're kids.

We all do stupid shit we know we shouldn't, even when we know it will lead to bad outcomes for us, because fuck it.

Work is stressful, fuck it entire pizza for lunch. I'm sad and lonely, fuck it I'm calling my ex. I have a shitty headache, fuck it imma chew this stupid customer out. Omg I need to know what happens, fuck it I'm binging the rest of this series at 1am on a work night. Partyyyyyyyy fuck it lets finish the entire bottle. And so on, and so forth.

Emotion management and impulse control is a learned skill, especially when you have to integrate it with all the social stuff. People have decades of experience, and they still fuck up.

What the flying fuck do you expect from a little kid? They're hilariously incompetent at literally everything; why do you imagine that they'd be automatically perfect at probably the most difficult complex and nuanced skillset there is? They need strategies for dealing, they need experience recognising that they need to deal, and they need time to develop enough emotional resources to take the strain.

And since when did anyone get better at learning any skill when every slipup leads to some asshole deliberately inflicting pain and/or misery on them?

That's not how you draw a dog, Emily. :thud: You made me do that.

You missed the ball, Billy. Now you don't get fed.

No, Kate, 5 x 8 is not 42, now I'm going to throw out all your toys.

It doesn't work like that. People need to learn from their mistakes just as much as from their successes - which means a safe environment with support and feedback, not anxiety, fear, pain and shame.

When my kid was about 6, he had the worst time with video games. He would get frustrated when he lost, frustration would make him worse at the game, he'd start losing more and more, get even more frustrated and he'd spiral into a meltdown and storm off in rage and floods of tears and be absolutely miserable for ages.

Getting angry and melting down because you lost at a video game is entirely unacceptable behaviour, but just heaping more misery on him for doing it would have been not only highly counterproductive but a complete dick move as well.

So instead of doing that, I taught him how to manage the emotion - how to recognise the feeling of frustration, how to recognise when it was building up past his ability to handle, and then to step back and take a break until he was out of the red zone before getting back to it. It took trial and error and a whole bunch of practice, but by god it worked.

Once he got the hang of managing it, not only did the meltdowns stop, but the breaks got shorter and rarer as he smoothed out the curve and got to practice increasing his tolerance without catastrophic failure blowing the whole thing up. Before long he was actively seeking out the most ridiculous rage-games like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV just to revel in it (and beating the shit out of me at them too, little tyke).

And this principle generalises across the board. Teach them to manage the gigantic emotions and impulses that assail them from all sides. Give them a strategy for dealing with them - and when something gets past them, acknowledge the failure, make restitution if necessary, then postmortem what went wrong and how to handle it better next time. They may not like the process, but that's worlds away from deliberately inflicting shit on them for the sake of it.

They absolutely do need the feedback, you can't just give blanket approval to everything and expect results - you just keep it constructive. It's that simple. Unconditional love and they need to do better than that what the fuck little dude.

And when they're too little to reason about stuff, that's what the Parent Voice and judicious use of Death Glare is for. You don't need to yell, you just go full Mufasa on them as necessary. There's a couple of cheap tricks you can use to de-escalate threenager tantrums, mostly by interrupting the self-talk loop.

And it works. My kid got all the way through the school system without ever getting in any kind of trouble; I don't think I needed to even tell him off about anything past the age of 10 or so. We have a great relationship, I never had to be a dickhole to my kid, and I never relied on intimidation to maintain authority through his childhood, it just naturally tapered off into mutual cooperation as he got older.

Negative punishment paired with discussion of behavior and reasoning seems to be the gold standard these days.