Misbehaving children: Should you discipline them?

Discipline is a must. The question shouldn’t be “Should I discipline my child?” the question should be “What’s the best way to discipline my child?”. If a child steal, and is never disciplined about it, he might carry that habit into adulthood where disciplined is a bit more serious than a spanking.

There’s a big difference between child abuse and disciplinary action when a child misbehave. If a child is disciplined due to clumsiness or accident; it’s child abuse. If a child is disciplined when he swears at one of the parents; it’s discipline.

There’s different methods to discipline a child. I identified 3 and bellow is the order of which my parents would do them to me.

1. Explaining the situation; putting me as the victim: My Dad would explained the situation to me in different perspective, usually putting me in “the victims” position, saying things like “What would you do if someone would steal your toys? Would you like that?”. This method still helps me today in my decision making.
2. Removing privileges: “Go to you room and think about what you did!”. I still remember having phone calls from friends and the embarrassment of having to tell them I was grounded (or worse, my mom telling them I was).
3. Spanking: “Don’t hit your sister or you’ll be spanked”. Just the fear of being spanked was enough for me to “behave”. Spanking was, more often than not, a last resort if the first two wasn’t working.

The perfect parent doesn’t exist. The best thing, that my parents did, was listening to me.