How to stop punishing your kids
How do we move away from punishment as a form of discipline?
Where do we start?! How do we move away from punishment as a form of discipline?! Well, let me kick off with a very specific example.
Your 6-year-old lashes out and hits their 1-year-old sibling during a moment of frustration.
Approach #1 - Punishment
You yell,
“WHAT DID YOU JUST DO THAT FOR? That was wrong! No more playing with your toys today. You are grounded!"
You take toys away as punishment.
Your child may cry, feel angry, and believe they are "bad" without fully understanding why hitting was wrong or how to handle frustration differently.
The behaviour stops temporarily, but your child has not learned how to handle their emotions effectively or how to deal with conflict in a better way.
Approach #2 - Calm but authoritative
You separate your children and acknowledge the feelings of your oldest,
"I see you're upset because your sister took your toy. It's okay to feel mad. It's not okay to hit."
"It looks like you were feeling frustrated. What can we do next time instead of hitting?"
"You can tell me if you feel frustrated, or you can use your words to ask for your toy back. Let’s practice that."
"How do you think we can help your sister feel better?"
This approach helps your child understand that while frustration is normal, hitting is not the right way to handle it. You've also provided tools to help with emotional regulation. By responding this way you’re also helping the relationship between your little ones as the older child learns to empathise and manage emotions, while the younger one feels more secure. Compared with yelling and grounding, where the oldest might start building resentment towards the youngest.
When we feel the need to punish our child (be it screaming, yelling or even spanking), chances are our child is pushing our boundaries, testing a limit we've set or displaying some form of challenging behaviour.
Maybe you've spent an hour making them a lovely meal which they're refusing to eat, maybe they're on their fourth meltdown of the day because you served their lunch in a blue bowl and they wanted it in a yellow bowl, or maybe they're downright refusing to turn off the TV.
Depending on the age of our child it may be that you need to model how to effectively regulate your emotions, or it might be that you need to model what appropriate behaviour looks like when you’re frustrated, angry or upset.
In these moments if you’re able to respond to your child with a level of calm (if only some of the time), then you’re well placed to teach your child those all-important life lessons. I get it, it’s difficult to move forward with this when you struggle with regulating your own emotions, and that’s something all parents need to work on every single day.
“Children learn what they see and they certainly learn what they live. So if we're aggressive towards our child then our child will learn to be aggressive, they'll learn that that's how adults deal with situations, they yell, they shout and they shame.”
For me, a huge motivator in moving past punishments was appreciating that my little one needed me during his worst moments. If we're shunning our child in those challenging moments, if we're withdrawing our love and sending them into a corner to deal with these big emotions all alone, then what are we teaching them?
And further to that, if we're aggressive, if we're yelling or spanking them, then what are we teaching them? We're teaching them that their big feelings don't matter. We’re encouraging them to suppress their emotions.
We're teaching them that we're unavailable when they need us most.
If we aim to raise emotionally intelligent children who display empathy towards others, then we need to meet them with compassion and empathy, not just in their best moments, but their worst moments too. To close out, let me share an important quote by Catherine M. Wallace,
"Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff."
Continue reading this in my brand new free guide, ‘The 2025 Guide to Parenting Without Punishment’…
You can also listen to the audiobook for free here.
Thank you for being part of my community. Feel Good Fatherhood is a reader-supported publication. If you can and value my work, or if you take value in my daily content over on Instagram, please consider becoming a paid subscriber ($5/month), so I can continue to show up and make a positive impact.
Tom Piccirilli, Founder of The Dad Vibes