Punishment is useless, but children need consistent rules

Punishment is useless, but children need consistent rules

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For centuries an absolutely too rigid, authoritarian and non-affective education is established. Today for the situation seems to have reversedwith parents who are almost afraid of hurting their child by saying a simple No. Today, punishments have rightly disappearedwhich cause children a sense of mortification that does not help them grow or take responsibility. For they have often been replaced by rivers of words, which overwhelm increasingly insecure children and make parents increasingly frustrated and ineffective with long, redundant, detailed explanations. But do parents, in their educational task (and therefore of obvious opposition from their children), only have so many complex explanations left to inflict? It is observed that the parent’s certainty of being able to convince through dialogue collapses miserably with every little frustration that the child must inevitably suffer and accept. Too often we see them dejected, erroneously convinced that the force of reason can form a wall against the opposing force of the child who, with screams and kicks, opposes every educational attempt. Dialogue and reasoning are indispensable with adolescent children, but the child’s age and level of understanding cannot be ignored.. The young child has other thought patterns and fails to interact with logical reasoning. The sensation therefore that all this talk is a refuge, a sort of democratic and modern shell, behind which the parent hides to cover the anxiety that assails him at every meeting/clash with the child.

It was right to abandon the parental right to be able to punish physically, and punishment in general: the child needs clarity, coherent and unambiguous rules, not to feel threatened by his loved ones, in whom he places complete trust. But all this has not been replaced with other ways that force him to stop, to understand what is not right, to develop his ability to understand what is wrong and how to correct it. Today we are forced to always and in any case understand the reasons behind the wrong behaviors of the children, always bringing the point of responsibility a little further back, always to the outside., thus acquitting the son anyway. On the other hand, a legitimate concept, given that no one actually determines themselves and that therefore at the basis of the child’s wrong action there is always an external motivation that determined it: nothing happens by chance and suddenly.


Sometimes the causes are more evident and therefore more easily identifiable, other times it is more difficult to find the beginnings, the small symptoms which add up to negative action. But this careful reading and awareness of the adult must help to understand the real causes of being bad and therefore work best to remove them, without giving rise to a sort of uncritical guarantee for the child, a generalized pardon. A situation of impunity precisely in the critical period of growth, in which a sense of duty, of responsibilities, of the consequences of one’s actions is building. The parent must deliver these values, regardless of the many motivations behind the child’s actions. Let’s take some examples: It is true that the child can stop studying because he is in crisis due to the separation of his parents, but it is equally true that the parents who are separating would add damage to the damage if they did not take him back for his abandonment of school by stimulating his sense of duty. Similarly, hitting your classmates is not so much an expression of malice as it is probably of relational discomfort: even if you understand that it could be determined by a problem experienced in your own context, you still have the duty to reproach him, so that the concept that physical aggression cannot and should never be a means of communication. Therefore: starting from the assumption that bad children do not exist, this however cannot exempt us from intervening with respect to the incorrect way of acting. We don’t need to inflict punishments but we need to educate! Without rivers of words, but it is necessary to clearly create in the child the sense of the error of what he has done, precisely to prevent him from continuing to act in a non-social way.

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November 25, 2022 | 12:14

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