So you’ve done it. You’ve made the commitment—you’re not going to parent the way you were parented. Perhaps your parents did the best they could with the tools they had, or embraced harsh punishment out of some sense of cultural or religious obligation. Perhaps you’ve read the spate of recent research articles on all the negative social and emotional effects of spanking. Turns out, spanking interferes with a child’s ability to gain interpersonal intelligence and interpersonal effectiveness skills, is correlated with later life mental health problems, and most crucially—it doesn’t work. It doesn’t actually teach what we think it teaches. In many cases, it can reinforce the very behaviors we're trying to teach kids not to use.

Most post-traumatic and cycle-breaking parents tell me, "I know what not to do, but I have no clue what to actually do. If I don’t spank, how can I keep my kids safe? How can I stop them from becoming playground bullies, or teach them there are consequences to anything from staying up too late to pushing other children on the playground to running into the street without looking both ways?" It seems scary to abandon spanking and other forms of harsh discipline.

So, here’s the thing:

Precisely because you want your children to listen to you, to be guided by you, and to learn social pragmatics and self-regulation skills from you—that’s why you don’t want to spank them.

There are much more effective ways to teach children how to behave appropriately, to help children learn social pragmatics skills, to instill conflict resolution abilities, and even to keep children safe.

We're going to discuss the first two in depth in this installment, and follow up with the final three in the second installment.

Many post-traumatic........

© Psychology Today