Do increasing severe punishments actually help eliminate an unwanted behavior? I’m curious, since I’ll have to deal with this at some point. As kids, we had the threat of death overhanging us, which was fairly effective at eliminating behavior, but unfortunately not so good at helping keep sanity. I doubt that even if I wanted to go there that my wife would agree, so killing them wouldn’t be an option for us.
I like the natural consequence theory of parenting and wonder if that is what Left Hand of Dorkness is doing with his student. Is providing the natural consequence of lying, which is a lack of trust and hence eliminating future rewards rather than take away agreed upon rewards (going to the party) more or less effective?
Or, since the lying is ongoing, can rewards be given conditionally, such as “You can go to the party next week if you don’t lie in the mean time.” Or does that just encourage kids to be more careful about the lies?
Yep–I’m not a partisan to any particular theory of parenting, but the whole “natural consequences” thing makes a lot of sense to me, and I try to use it at home and in the classroom. There’s a few books, “Parenting with love and logic” and “Teaching with love and logic”, that espouse a “natural consequences” approach, and I take ideas from them pretty often.
We have gone through this with my daughter and are now going through it with my son. I really think there is a phase for lying IME.
How did we get my daughter to stop? It wasn’t easy.
We started by explaining that Mommy and Daddy are there to help her and that when she doesn’t tell the truth, we don’t know the best way to help. Also, we are a family which means we are all on the same ‘team.’ So, she should not lie to teammates or to us. This was repeated (eventually to he annoyance) every time she told a mistruth.
She was also stealing things (little things, mostly belonging to me) and lying about it. This actually cleared itself up when I started spending more one-on-one time with her. Apparently, she needed my attention so as a substitute, she used having my stuff around.
The other thing we did was to give her plenty of opportunities where she could be in trouble to tell the truth. Things like, ‘Did you leave the light on?’ If she said yes (since I knew it was her), I would just ask her (with please and thank you) to turn it off. If she said no, she would get sent to her room for the lying lecture again. Eventually, she started telling the truth about all the little things and the big things just followed gradually.
She still slides back now and then (at times of high stress) but we can usually see it coming (since her mood is less stable and she is very emotive). When we do we try to give her more one-on-one time to cut it off at the pass and if it does happen we go back to the consistency of what we were doing before.
(Aside: now that we know how to handle it, the situation with our son is actually going much smoother.)
One more thing: as for the punishment. I think every parent has doled out a punishment that was overkill at least a few times.
If your daughter is struggling with boundaries, then I would probably follow through with the punishment. She will hate it now but it will make her feel more secure in the long run.
Additional aside, another good way to deal with lying proactively is to never lie to your kids. Even when telling the truth is difficult.
This is freaking brilliant by the way. Kids don’t stop and think about consequences so conditioning them to react the way you want to without thinking is the ideal way to go.