| Product: |
How to Discipline Children |
| Date: |
04/08/02 (596 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: There are no long term advantages of smacking.
Disadvantages: Violence breeds violence
I love my children dearly; they both wave to me when I leave for work in the morning and rush to cuddle me when I walk through the door at the end of the day. The thing I find hard to understand is when people talk about smacking their children, I think of all the love I have for mine and then think of physically harming them and it is not possible for me to hit them. I have inadvertently hurt them whilst playing and the cries of pain give me immense guilt, for example playing football and hitting them with the ball making them fall over, so to actually hurt them intentionally is abhorrent to me. I hear people using the old cliché “smacking didn’t do me any harm…” in my opinion it must have harmed them because they are justifying hitting their own children because they were hit as children. Smacking or whatever else people call it, it is still hitting and hitting is assault no matter how it is justified.
There are other ways to discipline children that don't involve hitting them. I have 2 sons, one is 18 months old and the other is five. And as I have said I love them to bits, if my 18-month-old is doing something wrong for example; pulling something out of a cupboard, I say no and pick him up and move him away, I will do this until he understands that he shouldn’t do this. It takes patience as he will test this and still try again later but perseverance does work. The other day I walked into the front room and he had managed to get hold of my new issue of Formula 1 magazine and ripped it, he loves the pictures of F1 cars, and in his excitement to see them he pulled out a page. I hadn’t read the magazine yet and was a little upset, I called out “Oh no!” he could see how upset I was and started to cry, this is when guilt crept in and I had to cuddle him. The thing is, it was my fault for leaving the magazine in a place he could reach so how could I be angry with him. I have now given him his own
magazine that he likes looking at (it has a couple of pictures of F1 cars that he insists on showing me at every opportunity), now if he gets hold of any other magazine I say no and give him his own one, this is slowly working and stops the screaming sessions.
My 5-year-old has recently been diagnosed as being autistic and because of this his behaviour can be extreme. He can become quite aggressive for no apparent reason; it can be something quite small, such as something being moved. When he is like this we usually send him to his room and if he will not go I carry him up. Because we have always sent him to his room if he were misbehaving he usually takes himself up, it is only when he is, for want of a better word, having an exceptional autistic moment that I have to resort to carrying him up. Allowing him space in his room gives him the opportunity to calm down making it easier to talk to him and explain why he was sent to his room in the first place. Hitting him would not be an option as he would never understand why and from other peoples experiences he would then hit us thinking it was the norm. Generally he is a very happy boy and his outbursts are very few, we are lucky that his autism is quite mild, relative to others that we meet. We have found patience and trying to plan things in advance helps but sometimes he can still be unpredictable.
Here in Scotland it is now illegal to smack children under the age of 3, while this is a good thing I find it hard to believe that any one would smack children under that age. Because they are still learning the difference between right and wrong, so hitting them for something they didn’t know was wrong is odd. And because they are still learning the difference between right and wrong hitting would make them think hitting is acceptable.
There are plenty of good books on the market giving good ways of teaching children right from wrong and ways of disciplining children that doesn't inv
olve hitting them, such as “Toddler Taming” by Dr Christopher Green and “The Secret of Happy Children” by Steve Biddulph.
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