I'm skeptical, too. But if I'm going to have to do it, I'd better at least organize my thinking about it.
I spent a lot of time thinking about discipline.
My parents had four daughters. I am the third. The results they got were a disaster. All four of us were seriously depressed for a large chunk of our lives at home and thereafter. One is chronically ill (CFS etc.). One had an eating disorder, was violent, dated a guy later convicted of raping an 80 year old woman. Two sisters abuse or abused a number of substances and attempted suicide (of the cry for help variety). I was seriously depressed, often contemplating suicide and had specific plans regarding killing myself and others. There are a ton of allergies in our family, and one sister has a seizure disorder. It took me a long time to get healthy enough to talk about my suicidal thoughts, and longer after that before I was healthy enough to threaten to kill myself. These are shitty results from parenting, and I do not believe this is purely, or even mostly, the results of bad genes.
I had thought about my friends years earlier as models for what kind of intimate adult relationships I wanted to cultivate. It was a natural next step to pay attention to their parenting styles, and ask them how they learned to do what they do. Almost without exception, my friends similarly are determined not to repeat the mistakes of those who raised them. They had a variety of strategies, ranging from following their instincts, through taking classes or attending parenting groups or therapy, or watching television shows, reading and talking to friends.
I, personally, am all about the books. They are the habit I cannot give up. They were my only pleasure for many years. They have been an important part of every major decision in my life. It made sense for me to read parenting books, even though many, many people I trust a lot were openly contemptuous of the genre as a whole.
While I absolutely believe that many parenting styles can work very well, and most (legal) parenting styles will produce functioning adults (after all, I'm here), I also believe that producing a functioning adult is too low a bar. I further recognize that most people have neither the motivation, the inclination or the resources to completely eradicate their parents style of parenting when raising their own children. No book in the world, possibly not all the books in the world, can entirely solve my problem for me.
I was raised in a world in which discipline was an either/or proposition: either you beat your kids, or they become spoiled at least and more likely delinquent if not criminal. Parents present a united front. What parents say is what happens. Force will be used, in an organized fashion (with a lecture, not in "anger"), as often as necessary to gain compliance. In this world, lying, sneaking, drinking, drug abuse, shifting blame and violence between children was quite common.
The world outside my church was permissive, and that was a bad thing.
Of course, the church also claimed that everyone in was good, and everyone out was bad, and to the extent that was not the case was (a) just a little delay before they got booted out or (b) why we were out there knocking on people's doors on Saturday morning. Needless to say, the church was wrong on all counts, which was quite easy to determine as an adult, but not obvious to a very isolated child or adolescent desperate to appease her parents.
I knew a lot of people, once outside the church, who used Consequences and Time-Outs, Grounding, Loss of Privileges and similar strategies, rather than beating their children. Their results looked a lot better: the kids were more human, the relationships were much more pleasant, family life existed (rather than being a regimented facade) and seemed at least somewhat enjoyable to the members. Still a fair amount of lying, procrastination, squabbling and other chronic complaints. Clearly an improvement, but one that left me looking for more ideas, particularly after one of my young friends visited and we had an argument about whether she would be taking a shower. I can get compliance without resorting to beatings, but I did not like the effect it had on me internally, or the effect it had on our relationship. It took only a few days with a borrowed child to establish I was not happy with my informal theory of parenting.
I started reading about discipline, and found out about a three-way division of discipline strategies: authoritarian (I knew I did not want that), authoritative, and permissive (but possibly a good thing here). People mostly wanted to do authoritative, which was a combination of (a) not beating the kid up, physically or otherwise (b) motivating, rather than exacting compliance, usually by a combination of environmental controls, with some carrot-and-stick. A lot of verbal reasoning was involved, which looked a little iffy if tried on a very young child. Being permissive sounded a lot like basically doing everything to support your child and not expecting anything back for oneself, which is great in theory, but did not sound like something I could actually consistently implement, and I did not want to resort to tyrannical snits whenever I ran out of rope.
Several months later, I had my own baby, and started breastfeeding, which gave me a lot of practice interpreting non-verbal signals, and a lot of direct feedback to tell me when I was getting it wrong (chomped on nipples). I adopted a strategy here of assuming that if I was in conflict with my baby, my baby was right and I was wrong; I just figured out how to make that make sense and everything would be fine, which sounds permissive, but wasn't actually. In practice, I got what I wanted the vast majority of the time, and when I didn't, I wasn't necessarily unhappy with what did happen.
Several books later, I had a new theory, that involved a lot of pre-flight basic needs checking, perspective taking, attention to keeping the cup of attachment filled, and autonomy support (Ginott, Faber/Mazlish, Cohen, Karp). Another child (pre-school) visited, and I found some more flaws in my approach.
After licking my wounds once again, and reading some more books, I am now writing several chapters on Discipline, so Expect These To Change. As always, I will try to show my work.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created January 23, 2006 Updated January 23, 2006