A lot of people around me are having kids and every day it becomes more apparent that hitting your children to punish them is insane because literally everything can be a horrible punishment in their eyes if you frame it as such.
Like, one family makes their toddler sit on the stairs for three minutes when he hits his brother or whatever. The stairs are well lit and he can see his family the whole time, he’s just not allowed to get up and leave the stairs or the timer starts over. He fucking hates it just because it’s framed as a punishment.
Another family use a baseball cap. It’s just a plain blue cap with nothing on it. When their toddler needs discipline he gets a timeout on a chair and has to put the cap on. When they’re out and about he just has to wear the cap but it gets the same reaction. Nobody around them can tell he’s being punished because it’s in no way an embarrassing cap, but HE knows and just the threat of having to wear it is enough.
And there isn’t the same contempt afterwards I’ve seen with kids whose parents hit them. One time the kid swung a stick at my dog, his mother immediately made him sit on the stairs, he screamed but stayed put, then he came over to my dog and gently said “Sorry Ellie” and went back to playing like nothing happened, but this time without swinging sticks at the nearby animals.
The psych nerds found out ages ago that punishments that make the child think for a few minutes (about one minute or year of age until they're tweens) is much more helpful to develope social intelligence and understanding than punishments which prevents thinking, like the ones that involve pain. In fact, corporal punishment encouraged lying, extreme reactions, violent outbursts, go figure, they don't trust you.
This is all really fucking serious and important and I'm mainly reblogging for that, because this correct mentality needs to be spread around more, but I'm also reblogging because I absolutely lost it at the child who dreads having to wear the normal blue hat of shame.
