Discipline Is an Essential Tool for Parenting
ByOne South African Game Reserve has a big problem. Experts there are worried about some of their young male elephants, who’re behaving very badly. They’re attacking tourists and trying to mate with female white rhinos. In fact, over a period of three years, nineteen rhinos have been gored to death, and one rogue elephant even killed the professional hunter who was sent in to shoot it. Experts are unanimous: the young elephants’ unusually aggressive and violent behaviour is the result of their never having been disciplined and nurtured by a ‘matriarchal female’. Put simply, they’re missing their mothers!
The problem was that the young elephants were moved from one Game Reserve to another without their mothers or any other family members. Since they’d already been weaned, the park authorities assumed it was safe to move them. But they were wrong . . . and the results have been disastrous.
Discipline has a bad press. For most of us, it’s a word that conjures up Victorian images of children being ‘seen but not heard’. A century ago, parents were stern, table manners were impeccable and punishment was severe. ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’ was the household motto. Discipline was all about punishment, and punishment was all about the cane, the belt or – if your parents were the soft type – just the slipper!
The problem with this is that the Victorians have left many of us still believing that ‘discipline = punishment’: nothing more and nothing less. Just yesterday I was reading a book on parenting, published only last year, in which three whole chapters were given over to discipline. Unfortunately, all of them were about how to punish children for their mistakes . . . usually with a wooden spoon on the backside!
But seeing punishment and discipline as the same thing creates another very destructive problem: love and discipline are then seen as contradictory. You can do one or the other, but you can’t love your child and discipline them in the same breath. As a result of this misunderstanding, some parents choose to underplay the role of discipline, while others steer well clear of it altogether because they see it as cruel, negative and unloving. And then, often too late, they end up wondering why they can’t do anything to control their children’s behaviour.
The truth is that discipline and punishment aren’t the same thing at all. Discipline is about a whole lot more than just punishment. In fact, punishment is only a very small part of healthy discipline, which should be an overwhelmingly positive experience. And love, far from being something that contradicts discipline, is its motivation, its cause and its goal.
Discipline should be the framework and encouragement that a loving parent creates for their child in order to help them gradually learn how to control their behaviour, and develop self-discipline. Discipline should be an enabler: a creative force designed to build maturity and consistency, helping children fit into society without being swamped by it. Discipline should give your children the self-control they need to manage what they do, both now and in the future.
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