Punishing Your Child Won't Teach Them Lessons

The year started just a few short weeks ago, and you have already received five calls from your child's school. He isn't involved in class, is disturbing the lesson, talking back to his teachers, and fighting with his classmates. At home, things aren't much better, and you're at your wit's end. You're ready to teach him a lesson, a lesson he won't soon forget...

The problem with this idea is that punishing your children doesn't teach them lessons. Punishments don't teach.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't hold our children accountable for negative behaviors. On the contrary, keeping our children accountable is essential for their growth and learning, but it isn't the punishment that teaches the lesson.

This is an essential concept in parenting, so I would like to explain in more detail.

I received an email from a parent thanking me for these articles. She wrote how the messages of empowerment and focus on building a child's feeling of success resonate with her. She added that she never says no to her child, afraid that if she dared say no, her child would turn around and say no to her demands as well.

I understand her concern about saying no to her child, but the truth is that children need to hear no, and children need to be held accountable for their negative behaviors. This plays a vital role in parenting, and we harm children by disregarding this reality. Like everything, our goal is to use discipline correctly and with the proper balance.

Children are born with potential that is beyond comprehension. So much so, that the Rambam writes that every person has the potential to reach the heights of Moshe Rabbeinu. But for children to reach their full potential, they need parental direction and guidance. Our children aren't born knowing right from wrong, and they are on a continuous learning journey.

And it's not just knowledge that they are lacking. An essential part of chinuch is holding our children accountable for negative behaviors. This is an integral part of chinuch that when skipped, causes the child great harm.

The problem is when we use punishment as a means to teach lessons.

"I'm going to once and for all teach him a lesson" doesn't work. When we use fear as a means to teach positive behavior, we risk having positive action only when the child is afraid of the negative repercussions. As soon as that fear is gone, the child can move back to those same behaviors. This is vital, as our goal in parenting is setting our children up for a life of success and not merely controlling their behavior while they are still under our watchful eye.

A classic example of this idea is speeding on the highway. Most of us would be happy to drive 10-15 miles above the speed limit, but we drive slower because we fear getting pulled over and getting the dreaded traffic ticket. If we were sure that we wouldn't be pulled over, we would be driving significantly faster even though we have years of conditioning due to our fear of traffic tickets.

The reason for this is that fear doesn't in itself teach lessons.

In contrast to fear of punishment, healthy discipline is essential for children's growth—as long as it's used correctly.

Healthy discipline helps a child learn to live a life of accountability and deal with the concept of cause and effect. It also helps create a framework of what is and isn't expected and builds healthy habits. Maybe most importantly, it helps keep a child in line until they themselves feel positive about their worthy actions.

(Sparingly, punishment can be used to generate a fear of crossing specific red lines—running in the street would be one such example. This is a separate form of discipline that is fine when used sparingly but isn't the focus of this article.) 

Fear and punishment must not be our go-to approach to teach our children. As we see in the driving example, punishments don't by themselves teach lessons.

So if punishments don't cause children to learn lessons, how then does growth happen?

Real growth happens because of the positive feeling we feel when acting appropriately. It's the fact that we want to act this way and now can do so which causes the action to become ingrained in us.

And healthy discipline helps to create an environment which facilitates this process.

Let me explain a bit better by explaining what I call "The Cycle of Growth. "

Personal growth doesn't work in a vacuum. There is a process that occurs which spurs and facilitates growth.

On a basic level, the process is made up of four parts 

1: Something motivates us to move out of our comfort zone.

2: We push ourselves and do something difficult

3: We find meaning and feel good about the difficult work that we did 

4: This feeling inspires us to take the next challenging step, and we start the cycle anew

(This process sounds deceptively simple, but so much can be learned by delving into it. I hope to delve further into "The Cycle of Growth" in a further article.)

If we skip step 3 and don't find meaning or lack pride in our difficult work, the process of growth is broken, and we don't internalize the work that we did.

And this absence of meaning is why the conditioning in the traffic ticket example didn't prevent us from speeding in situations where the fear of getting a ticket is removed.

If we would tweak the story and have the driver find meaning and pride in not speeding, we would then find that the conditioning will work, even when we remove the fear of receiving a ticket.

And this is what we want to focus on with our children.

Discipline and an environment of cause and effect are essential, and something we must have to facilitate our children's growth. Discipline, though, doesn't in itself teach lessons. We must help our children find meaning and pride in their efforts to help them b’d grow and to help that our environment of cause and effect leads to long term change.