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Parental power can be used destructively.

But it can also be used for the good of the child.

Three options for dealing with misbehavior are punishment, consequences and collaborative consequence setting.

Recently, a colleague wrote to me about one of my most recent blog posts. In the post, I talked about the need for punishment and/or consequences when children or teens break a rule or behave in a way that the parents have told them not to. My colleague objected to my suggesting that punishment may be an option. He said, "I prefer consequences. Punishment for me evokes power."

And this raised a question for me: is the parent-child relationship one in which there is an inherently unequal power dynamic?

In Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, psychoanalyst and political theorist Elisabeth Young-Bruehl argued that the parent-child relationship features a profound, inescapable asymmetry of power that leaves a lifelong psychological trace on the child. Rather than treating the natural dependency of a child as a neutral state, she wrote that adults weaponize this power imbalance through a deep-seated, systemic prejudice she called "childism."

She went on to say that childism emerges from three basic sources:

The desire for absolute control: Some parents feel they own their child, which she felt can lead to harsh discipline and a wish to control the child and make them what the parent wants them to be, rather than who they are.

Entitled superiority: This dynamic results from what Young-Bruel called the unexamined assumption that adults are automatically more rational, credible, and deserving of authority.

Erasure of agency: This imbalance results in the adult tendency to dismiss or pathologize children's emotions and rights because of their age.

While I am not an authority on Young-Bruehl's work, it is nonetheless easy for me to see the importance of what she had to say.

The........

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