Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but words will never hurt me.
This is how I grew up. As did my parents. And their parents, and their parents. In English at least, this saying has been around for over a hundred and fifty years and is the child's response to name calling and bullying. Yet today, words are so incredibly hard that they should be feared more than sticks and stones, as words apparently do much more damage.
Punched in the face by a sound.
Seems incredibly silly, doesn't it?
Words are important, but not nearly as important as action. And when it comes to learning, words are not enough for most people. Otherwise, learning to do anything just requires reading a book on the process, and you are good to go. Like getting an upload from the matrix on how to fly a helicopter. But, for those who have ever read a book on surfing and then tried it and fallen and fallen and fallen - it is pretty clear that words are not enough.
And this goes for a lot of parenting also, where these days, parents have conversation with their children on what they consider right and wrong and how to behave, expecting that the children will learn from the conversation alone. This is highly unlikely. Which also means that conversation to correct behaviour, are not likely to work either.
It is easy to cover a lot of ground and reasoning with words, but rather than shifting behaviour, it likely has the opposite effect, where there is too much information to be actionable. The lecture might make the parent feel better, but the only punishment for the child, is having to listen to it. At some point, there has to be practical punishment.
Just like learning to surf requires getting on the board, paddling out to the back and then trying to catch a wave, all behavioural change requires behaviours to be changed. Seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? But, conversations are rarely enough to actually shift behaviour adequately.
Yet, think about the rhyme above, which mentions physical and verbal interactions, as well as implies emotional resilience. For a parent in many western countries, corporal punishment has been off the table for decades, and now words are taken off the table, so what is left?
Emotional abuse?
"No TV for a week!"
Is that a better lesson than a smack on the ass? It would seem so, right? but what the child is learning is about loss of something that isn't likely connected to the event itself. They are also learning to build a scarcity mindset, and to covet the entertainment of the TV as something to protect. Are they really the right lessons?
I don't think so.
We know a lot about learning and a lot about habit forming, and none if it says that a conversation is enough to break our bad habits and change our behaviour. It is all about setting up the environment to make it easy to do, as well as ensuring that it is practiced, and repeated, over and over. Not repeating the conversation, repeating the action over and over. The punishments today aren't repeating the correct actions, they are repeating the actions, thoughts and feelings that lead to a lot of emotional instability and weakness.
A smack was probably more effective, and less damaging.
Strange, isn't it?
The intention might have been to do less harm, but it could end up doing more harm through displacement. It is the bath, by pouring the water onto the floor. The bath is empty, but now there is a much larger problem than a tub full of water. And I think that because we have tried to "protect" people from any kind of harm, which sounds like a good thing, we have created an environment where everything is harmful, which isn't ideal.
This article actually has nothing to do with parenting, it is about learning. Learning is always an uncomfortable process, because it is about doing something we are not used to do, or finding out about something we had no idea about earlier. It is automatic discomfort, until we are comfortable knowing and doing it. Words might help us understand the conceptual level, but they don't give us the practice to understand the practical application of the concept. We need to get our hands dirty, we need to feel it.
My daughter constantly has bruises and scrapes on her legs and arms. Not because of punishment, but because she likes to climb trees and jump around in the playground equipment. These are little, painful lessons that help her understand how her body works, and what she needs to do to avoid getting hurt next time. It teaches her how to use her body effectively. Similarly, our mental and emotional parts need to get scraped and bruised on a wide assortment of "trees and equipment" in order for us to build up the knowledge and experience to truly understand what we are doing, how we are doing it, and whether we should try to do it another, more effective way.
Getting hurt by words?
What have you not learned about yourself?
Taraz
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I did a good bit around this as I have two small humans that we want to punish the right way . For example “GO TO YOUR ROOM” makes the child think their bedroom which should be their safe haven is a place for punishment . Giving them a food treat for being good gives them a bad association with Sweets or chocolate . So whenever they are good chocolate is the prize so we don’t want to end up with a couple of fatties if they get dumped by their partners and end up on the ice cream. All this background makes me think , a slap on the bum may be less damaging in the long run 🤣🤣
You should do some A-B testing, send one to the room and give chocolate, beat the other. In twenty years you will know which is better.
I actually think so, though I wouldn't dare hit my child. It is illegal. However, I get why there is the rule, but the thing is, no parent I know personally as a kid would ever actually beat their children, they would smack. It wasn't a real pain. The parents that would beat their kids, would they care about the law?
Yeah true that . My father said to me only the other day , he never slapped me and he was right. Wouldn’t really even come to mind really in this day and age .
Since I'm not a father (unfortunately), I can only speech for my perspective. I still remember one day that my father, pretty full of reason yelled at me. Since I wasn't expecting to cross that barrier, my response was a stammering “I'm sorry...” as tears streamed down my face and the sobs of a child who had been contradicted (fortunately) quickly learned that there are lines that should not be crossed.
Interestingly, and for the third time in two weeks, I am compelled to open my bedroom window to see what is going on. My new neighbor's son, a little boy just over 5 years old, decides it's funny to start kicking the front door of the building, until, after more than 2 minutes, his grandmother or mother, who were following him with the shopping, arrive to open the door.
I think if I did that, it would only be once. My parents would never let me do something so silly for no reason.
Today, for the third time, but in a more assertive way, and with the grandmother already arriving at the door, where her grandson was continuously kicking it, I said: “You know I live right next door. And I can hear all that noise in my room...” Let's see if this approach is enough.
Sometimes I think that some parents or grandparents, afraid of “traumatizing” the child, are unable to explain to them what is not right to do.
Education and learning aren't simple subjects or only two types... A myriad of possibilities is acceptable, but in these times, there is no common sense that prevails over violent and outlandish responses.
My mother said about her five kids,
"You all through a temper tantrum once. Just once."
The problem is, these days everything is considered violence to somebody. People are hyper-sensitive to anything that makes them even slightly feel bad and they protect themselves from everything, making themselves more susceptible to negatives. It is like people who have been raised with no spice in their diet, then moving to India.
Really tough questions you're asking. It's of course ideal if there's a simple action-consequence kind of relationship between things so kid can learn what their actions mean and they learn agency and self-effectiveness. However, there isn't always an easy way of inducing some direct consequences that don't feel like a (somewhat disconnected) punishment. Not sure if violence in whatever form can be beneficial or not in such cases, or whether this just causes the same kind of feeling abused as taking away certain pleasures would.
It's a slippery slope, and every parent needs to find their own way of navigating it. Here, one of the most important things for parents is to not judge the way others raise their children, but maybe instead reflect on why it's like that and if there's anything that can be learned from others...
The slippery slope runs both ways, but parents smacking their kids for 200,000 years got us this far. The slippery slope of being too easy, seems to be the one that is more likely to lead to being so easy it creates damage. When masses of adults cry over sounds they hear, I think something is wrong with society.
Not entirely sure I agree with that argument. Just because things have been a certain way for an extended period of time doesn't mean they're actually the best option in the current situation. After all, human progress has been accelerating over the last few centuries, which comes with entirely different requirements towards people and therefore education and socialization.
I agree with that second part though in that something is wrong when a lot of people complain about "problems" they've basically created themselves
Maybe so, but 2 million years of evolution have wired our bodies in a particular way, that doesn't necessarily fit with the requirements.
True, true
Sometimes I get hurt by words from people I know. Although 95% of the time I hear praise, the other 5% can have a negative effect on me. I don't know where this vulnerability comes from.
Isn't it funny how our ego likes to react more to the negatives than the positives?
While I was reading your thoughts, I wanted to draw parallels with my life. And my last painful lesson is related to the car. Until I damaged my car several times, I did not learn how to properly enter the driveway and park near the curb. Only after paying my hard-earned money several times did I become more careful. I am a mother of three children. I never punish my children physically. But I like to teach financial lessons. For example: they spent my money carelessly, next time they should earn it with their own labor and return this money to me. And then they understand this lesson. Learning is always discomfort. Thank you for the interesting discussion @tarazkp
Having the practical lesson is far more valuable than the verbal lesson.
Have you tried taking a defensive driving course? :)
It is true that even though we usually pay attention to talking, real change happens through actions and experiences.
And that change can be good or bad, depending on our experiences :)
Now, words in society have a strong impact on the lives of many people because they are emotionally accepted by the person. If a helpless person who is marginalized by society is verbally abused by the wealthy class, that person also falls mentally. But it is easy to argue with those words, and by changing the behavior of that poor person, the bad words he received can be accepted positively as well. But how practical it is is a logical matter. Words also had some impact on me as a child, and by changing my behavior, I provided them with a positive response.
This makes me think of the whole telling someone you are sorry as well. It seems that one sticks around quite a bit, but people are now starting to realize that making a kid apologize when they don't really mean it is kind of futile. I still think there is some good intent there, but with all of us so fragile these days who really knows.
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Being willing to step outside our comfort zone and do things we might not be good at (at first) is more uncommon than I expected. I wonder why children are so much more willing to venture out and try new things even if if means a few scrapes and bruises.
Speaking of bruises, This was my exactly one year ago trying to learn how to do double rope jumps:
I knew the theory, I knew what I was supposed to do, but to REALLY learn it and burn it into your muscle memory you've got to do the thing; whatever it is. Yes, we might suck at it at first, but it's the only way.
I think that learning at any level, even in relation to behavior, is based on a reward and punishment system. In the case of parenting, when parents were deprived of the right to physically discipline their kids, only words remained. And when they were then deprived of the possibility of scolding or reprimanding them verbally, only privileges remained. That is why what you mention happens, with parents taking away their children's privilege of watching television for a week as a form of punishment that is intended to be severe. While I agree that this is not an effective punishment for disciplining kids, I understand that parents do this because they feel powerless, lacking other resources that would be more effective and that were used in the past but can no longer be used due to modern conventions or laws.
But speaking of learning at all levels, we have to say that it cannot be accommodating, because learning without pain, without experiencing both frustrating and positive experiences, is ineffective and useless. Of course, wisdom should always come first, but if human beings were wise, we could learn effectively just based on the experience of others, but it is not. One lesson to us on this is what is wise is not always the most comfortable or the least painful.
What should be well known by now is that, unfortunately, human learning does not work in an axiomatic way, but rather in a primitive and animalistic way, based on the reward-punishment scheme. This means that if you make decision “A” and it goes wrong, then you make decision “B,” and if that goes right, then you learn that that is the correct one. This means that learning is dichotomous or binary, based on right or wrong. Also, it is related to emotions, good and bads. This is the only way it can be, because if we eliminate the experience of pain and leave only the reward, the balance is upset and learning does not occur. That is my opinion on this matter.
You have touched on very accurate points. Indeed, just talking is often not enough; it comes with actual learning, experience and practice. This is the same in raising children; we need to set an example with our behaviors rather than words. Your surf analogy summed up the situation very well, I was very impressed while reading. @tarazkp
Thinking back to my childhood, listening was like punishment. If I had a mistake, I would bow my head and listen. Where there was punishment, productivity was either nonexistent or limited. Good learning comes from repetition. With practical intelligence, this can be made enjoyable.
Thinking back to my childhood, listening was like punishment. If I had a mistake, I would bow my head and listen. Where there was punishment, productivity was either nonexistent or limited. Good learning comes from repetition. With practical intelligence, this can be made enjoyable.
I get little bruises on my legs all the time, but i never remember even getting em. maybe I sleep walk? :P
As children we all used swear words. If we used them at the wrong time then a bar of soap was taken a bite of. A trip to the principal's office and a paddling way back when in school may have followed a cuss word or name calling... 🤬
We learned that words had consequences.
Well "we" that had a lick of sense did.
Only if you attempt to use it in isolation (like thinking you know how to surf because you read some books and maybe watched a couple of Youtube videos). My kids had pretty direct consequences for actions (not corporal punishment which I am mostly opposed to, I occasionally really feel like making some exceptions for adults when they annoy me enough to want to punch them) and several conversations that repeated in different ways about why that behaviour was unacceptable or considered rude.
the stuff requiring endless grades of nuance are the absolute worst when you're a glitchy adult that academically understands things that are apparently supposed to be normal in a healthy functional adult trying ro explain things to glitchy kids
Technically incorrect. In J's family it basically made his sister scared of doing the "wrong" thing (so gave the delusion that the punishment "worked") and she became a neurotic mess as an adult and only just started mellowing out in her late 30s to early 40s, and made J believe that might makes right and to just not get caught next time you wanted to do something the mightier had decreed illegal. I didn't get smacked much as a kid but I do seem to have an oppositional defiance glitch so whenever I did get smacked for something (Asian parents so half the time it involved one of those oldschool feather dusters with the wooden hooked handles) it just made me angry and resentful and even more convinced that I was in the right and my parents and by extension all adults were horrible evil oppressors that were just hellbent on preventing me from doing anything fun (even in the very confusing cases where I knew for sure that I had definitely screwed up).
A friend at the time did try to use cutting off internet as a punishment for her kids because apparently that was the only thing they cared about (they had tried other things to no avail because the kids quite simply didn't care) but this
seemed to happen instead.
Meanwhile we succeeded with cutting off the kids internet between 10pm and 6am when they were pre to early teens and were struggling to regulate their usage vs sleeping hours, which coupled with "you ARE getting out of bed in the morning when we have someone to be and you WILL NOT complain about being tired and you WILL participate because it is ENTIRELY YOUR FAULT that you are tired because you ACTIVELY REFUSED to go to bed at a reasonable hour" got them sorted.
I'm pretty sure they were initially just a loss aversion trying to protect their unfettered (it was always unrestricted during the day, we never cut it off completely) internet access at first but the understanding grew eventually which is what you want out of the conversations
Same! XD Were you also the "bad" parent just kind of driftling along under the play equipment keeping pace with your toddler so you could catch them if they misjudged something and fell off instead of anxiously shadowing directly behind them with arms out to catch them if they so much as misstepped?