Saturday, July 26, 2008

Disciplining Children: To Spank or Not To Spank

My normally gentle friend, Laurell, the East Mountain vet, sent this:

Spanking children

Many Americans have come to think it's improper to spank children. The other day I was talking to one of my younger associates about methods used to discipline children. He provided me with some interesting ideas.

We talked about "time outs", grounding, holding back "rewards" until the child displayed desired behavior etc. One of the things we discussed was the act of spanking and my friend explained that no, he NEVER spanks any of his children.

What he does, he said, is to take the misbehaving child out for a ride in the car and talk. By removing the child, in this case his son, from the immediate situation and providing a change of scenery, the child is allowed to focus on something different. Once the child has the opportunity to change perspective, things get better quickly and the child has better understanding of his place within the family and begins to understand the family's concept of acceptable behavior.

He said that usually this works and that the child calms down fairly quickly and really doesn't take too much time.

He kindly shared a picture of the process which I share with you now (scroll down).












2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I still daydream about finding the teacher who paddled me in boarding school and beating the ever-loving dogsnot out of him, so you can probably guess where I come down on that.

Anonymous said...

Love that picture and build up to it!