Spanking and Yelling Don't Promote Self-Discipline in Children

There is little evidence that either spanking or yelling is a long-term deterrent to misbehavior or that it promotes self-discipline. In general, spanking and yelling represent a failure on the part of the parent to manage her own anger, to plan ahead for her child’s success, to guide the child toward appropriate behavior, or to teach the child how to behave more appropriately.

Physical punishment and yelling make the child feel small and helpless and can be damaging to self-esteem. These two actions on the part of the parent may create resentment, may interfere with the parent-child bond, and model the use of aggression to solve problems. If you make the mistake of spanking or yelling, apologize to the child, explain why it happened, and resolve to do better in the future.

This is not to say that you will never become angry with your children. You will. This is only natural. And rather than bottle up this anger and have it burst out in the form of hitting or yelling, it is better to express it, as calmly as possible, in words. When my children were young and I became angry with them, I would say, “If I were a spanking mom, I’d spank the living daylights out of you right now!” That gave them the clear understanding that I was very angry with them, and they usually altered their behavior accordingly.

In addition to expressing your anger verbally when your children misbehave, you should look to yourself to determine whether or not circumstances have been a contributing factor in your child’s misbehavior. In order to do this, when your child misbehaves, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Are my expectations for the child’s behavior reasonable given the child’s age/stage of development?

• Have I listened carefully to my child’s feelings and motivations?

• Have I phrased instructions/rules as “dos” rather than “don’ts”?

• Have I enforced the rules consistently in the past?

• Is the environment supportive of appropriate behavior?

• Have I fully explained the both what is expected as well as the consequences of misbehavior?

• Is the consequence for misbehavior that I describe either natural or logical?

If the answer to any of the above questions is “no,” then you must take some responsibility for your child’s inappropriate behavior. In the future, you should make sure that you have set up the environment such that the child is likely to be able to behave appropriately and that your expectations for his behavior are reasonable and clear. You should also try to understand what led to your child’s misbehavior. In addition, you should make sure that the consequence of misbehavior has been understood by the child, and that the consequence is either natural or logical, and that the consequence is commensurate with the misbehavior.

No matter how you decide to respond to your child’s misbehavior, you should aim to stop the misbehavior before you become so angry that you feel the need to either yell or hit, both of which are frightening and potentially harmful to the child. The goal is to develop a full repertoire of parenting skills so that you will be less likely to respond to your child’s misbehavior in an un-tempered way.