Page 117 - The Intentional Parent

child will try to jerk away from you or will trip on something trying to avoid you, and be injured. Third, spanking tries to prevent a behavior from happening again by using humiliation as a teaching tool. Humiliating someone will cause resentment more often than it will enhance someone's desire to learn how to behave properly. The fourth and best reason is the many years of research that show that spanking just doesn't work and tends to make kids more aggressive, and less well-adjusted.
Whenever possible, concentrate instead on encouraging behavior you want to promote in your child. For instance, it is better to praise a child for using kind, appropriate language than it is to spank a child for using foul language. By the same token, it would be better to reward siblings for playing nicely with one another than to spank them for behaving aggressively toward one another.
WHEN TIME OUT DOESN’T WORK
I have been using "time out" as a way of disciplining my six- year-old son when he misbehaves. Whenever I send him up to his room, though, he never seems to care. He'll stay in there just to be spiteful, and then he'll come out and tell me he doesn't care how many times I send him up to his room. What can I do?
Time out is probably the most common technique parents use to discipline their kids. On the surface, the concept of "time out" seems pretty simple—if your child misbehaves, you send him off to his room to cool off and think about his behavior. In reality, using time out effectively means that you have to understand some of the fine points behind the concept, and these fine points are rarely taught to parents. First, the most important element of time out is that the child has to be taken out of an environment that is
The Intentional Parent by Peter J. Favaro, Ph.D. 117