Thoughts on Parenting

As a parent, when your child is having a meltdown, or doing something bad, or just being uncooperative, you may be tempted to use a bribe to get them to behave how you would like for them to. However, this isn’t a good path to start down, since your child will then learn to manipulate you to their advantage. Being given something to keep a child from doing something whilst they are doing this thing actually reinforces the bad behavior, since what you are really communicating to him is that he does x , you give y , and he stops doing x . This is bribery. This may be confusing, since we also know that when you reward good behavior, this encourages the good behavior to continue. So of course, the big question is “what is the difference between rewarding good behavior and bribing?” The big thing that differentiates between a reward for good behavior and a bribe is all in the timing . A bribe generally “…occurs under duress—right smack in the middle of a situation in which your child has s...

       Spanking a child has become more and more less the way that parents go when disciplining a child, and for good reason too. Numerous studies have shown that not only is it not an effective way of teaching your child, it also makes them more likely to become aggressive with other children, leading to a smaller possible social circle, which then leads to lacking proper social skills. Another possible outcome of inflicting corporal punishment on your kids is that they are more likely to experience mental health and cognitive problems. To talk specifically spanking, “spanking alone is associated with adverse outcomes, and these outcomes are similar to those in children who experience physical abuse” (Sege, 2018). That is absolutely awful! For those of you who don’t know the outcomes of physical abuse in children, let me give you a good descriptor of it, taken from an article by the NCBI, or National Center for Biotechnology Information: “Children who have exper...