Using punishment to discourage a child from bad behavior is not the best decision you make as a parent. You want your young one to realize their mistake, understand the consequences of their behaviors for others, and make a conscious choice of doing the right thing in the future. While punitive parenting may enable you to curb their misbehavior, the effects are likely to last for only a while. It’s time you realize that parenting guides answering the question of how to discipline your child with the word punishment have got it all wrong. Let’s take a look at why that is so.

Punishment Erodes the Parent-Child Relationship

The contemporary advices on how to get your kids to behave have a strong focus on the parent-child connection. What punishment does wrong is that it weakens the connection by eroding the relationship. The child who’s punished may begin to feel disconnect from their parents, and may lose their desire to please them. Furthermore, a punished child feels they’ve been wrong, and therefore turn bitter. Consequently, their behavior may get even worse.

Child Becomes Self-Centered

When disciplining your child, you want them to learn a lesson that’d help them to make the right choices in the future. However, when you punish them, they become preoccupied with their suffering and pay less attention to the consequences of their behavior for the other person. Instead of taking away their privileges or sending them straight to bed, you should sit down with them and firmly yet kindly help them realize their mistake and how it has hurt you as well as others.

Learn the Wrong Lesson

By punishing your kid, you may inadvertently teach them some very wrong lessons. Seeing you in the authoritative position and making them suffer consequences for their behavior, they may begin to believe that might is right and that the abuse of power is okay. They may eventually act on these believe, thus becoming unlikely to make moral choices in the future.

The Actual Problem May Not be Treated

As mentioned before, punishment may stop the child from misbehaving, but this may only be temporary. The reason for this is that while reacting to the symptoms in such a manner, you may miss the root cause of their difficult behavior, which may be anything from bullying, anger and hurt to anxiety and frustration. Left untreated, the problem may grow with the passage of time.

External Locus of Control

Another thing that punishment does wrong is that it leads kids into believing that it’s the responsibility of parents for getting them to do the right thing. Unless they are made to realize that they’re responsible as well as accountable for their behavior, they may not develop the habit to do the right thing out of compassion or on moral grounds.

Punitive parenting is not good for a child’s development. Rather than sticking with the traditional approach to discipline your young ones, you should transition to the more contemporary approach, which involves connecting with your kids and teaching them the lessons they need to learn through empathy, compassion and loving guidance.