You are an evil genius. 
I always thought my first love’s raging case of OCD was due to his mother’s invasive and controlling parenting style. Poor kid never had a bedroom door and the knob was removed from the bathroom door. Apparently barge-ins were constant, and she invented 100 reasons to enter his room and the bathroom under the guise of asking him if he needed anything.
You don’t wait until they are teens to begin to discipline them, for starters!
My daughter didn’t get her first cell phone until she graduated from high school. These days, kids in kindergarten have cells. Preposterous!
We didn’t tolerate backtalk or potty mouths. When you give a kid “The Look” and say, “Knock it off NOW,” you get results! I remember making my teen son cringe to the floor with a look. He KNEW he was wrong, and he KNEW I was pissed!
I hear about high school kids doing IDIOT things like texting and driving, and Mom throws up her hands and says, “Oh, I don’t know what to do!”
I’d know EXACTLY what to do! I’d walk straight over to the kid and say, “Gimme your phone,” and “Gimme your car keys.”
I told my kids the same thing my mother told me. “It’s MY house, and I pay the bills, you do as I say. You don’t like it, there’s the door.”
My kids are 30 and 27 today. I absolutely adore both of them. They are hard working, responsible, respectful of authority, and I’d trust either one with my life.
~VOW
Give 'em the walrus treatment!
True story: I attended a week-long conference of marine mammal trainers once. (Well, several times actually.) One trainer, a young female person who was very plainly giving her first-ever presentation and very nervous, was describing their training program for a walrus they had.
During the question-and-answer time, someone in the audience asked, How do you handle your walrus if she gets uncooperative or aggressive?
The trainer answered, without an instant of hesitation: “We beat her senseless.”
Audience breaks into spontaneous massive applause!
At the end of the week, a certain two trainers scouted around town for gift shops and gag shops, where they bought goofy items that somehow pertained to various things that people had said during the week, which they then presented to the various speakers on the last day. (This was a tradition – the same two guys did this every year.) For this walrus trainer, they presented a humongous foam-rubber mallet that they found somewhere.
I threatened it once, and the boy was absolutely petrified. I think he would run away from home if I ever tried to implement it.
I only really had to punish my oldest once, when she was around 14 and I accidentally read a message she’d written (copy-paste magick) about shoplifting with her cousin. I scared her. I called my brother and we both gave them guilt on top of guilt. Then I grounded her from going to the mall until I felt like I could trust her again. Calling her uncle embarrassed her more than anything, and she swears now at 23 she never stole again. I don’t know how my brother handled his end, but my niece was caught stealing twice after that. The last time she was arrested. I HOPE that taught her.
My eight year old is a lot more stubborn. She’s a little tale teller. I caught her not telling me about homework several days in a row and she lost her precious and beloved computer privileges for a week. I thought I’d pull my own hair out by the end of that week too, but now she’s taking out that homework every day without asking.
They did that to me, too, and also made fun of me for wanting privacy when I was changing my clothes. Taking the door of the hinges was just one more (and one big) violation of my boundaries, and it just really hurt me.
Put it this way – when I joined an intentional community that practiced material simplicity, I was asked what was the one thing I couldn’t live without. I didn’t answer a material good, I answered, “My privacy.” It’s the one thing of mine that I value above all else, and for my parents to take that away without a good reason seemed too harsh.
Frequent masturbation behind closed doors can cure some parents of this habit.
Our girl is 12. I wish I could remember the last time we had to punish her but I really can’t. Probably restrict the iPad and iPhone. TV too if we needed to bump things up. Then no friends over or vice versa.
Wow, the door thing… that’s just inspired.
My dad did catch me once (it wasn’t too bad, I could have almost played it off as nothing) and he just turned around and left. Never said anything about it. But still kept opening my door without warning.
That’s the way they always were with those kinds of things. When I was in grade school I knew a kid whose older brother had a subscription to Playboy, and he’d steal them, bring them to school, and trade them for those really good Crayola markers. That kid really loved markers. Anyway, I acquired one issue (at that age, purely out of curiosity) and hid it behind my bookshelf. Later that year I went on a school trip, and when I came back, everything in my room had been rearranged - my desk, my bookshelf, my bed, everything. Of course, the magazine was gone, but my parents never said a single word about it.
/hijack
I really don’t understand the removing the bedroom door.
I needed the sanity of closing the kids’ bedroom doors so I didn’t have to look at those disaster areas.
And when I had been pushed beyond the point of no return, I wanted them to go to their own rooms and close the door. I didn’t want to look at them, and they also had the freedom to say whatever they wanted to say about me in the privacy of their own rooms.
I think every person deserves privacy, whether for changing clothes, picking your nose, scratching your butt, it’s a primal need.
~VOW
I think it’s for when you need to show a kid that something was a Big Deal–lying, stealing, doing drugs. And it’s not like you keep it off for a month, you keep it off for a week. For a week they change clothes in the bathroom and have to sleep in PJs. It’s uncomfortable, not abusive.
I had to threaten that when Kiddo was in 6th grade. It seemed to work.
One thing I did, which I may get some flak for…when he was having a hard time remembering to go to math tutorial at lunch I wrote on his forearm in Sharpie pen, “Math tutorial”. He chose to wear long sleeves to school for a week, but he remembered to go to tutorial. This was also 6th grade. That was our roughest year.
Confine them to a room for two hours and play Frank Sinatra over and over. That’s what one school principal did and he/she claimed a 100% reformation rate. A bit racist, but white kids seem to hate the punishment the most. Black kids are a bit more appreciative of 'ol blue eyes.
This thread makes me want to nip the whole thing in the bud and get a vasectomy.
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic there.
When I grew up, thrashings were how children were controlled, and work fine so long as you want children to be fearful.
However, if the child becomes so rebellious that thrashings don’t work, there is nowhere to go, other than eviction from the house.
I don’t know the answer myself, so I avoided the problem by not having any, but there were many times I wished thrashings were still legal when being outraged by some badly behaved brat when out in public.
I could never have had anything like Playboy when at school, as a boarder, and would have been caned if found out, but when I started work, I aquired a substantial collection of centerfolds. When doing a job in Antarctica, I left them stored in my mother’s house, but when I returned a year later, they had all vanished. I never did pluck up the courage to ask her what she did with them, LOL.
So far - she’s 14 - simple removal of privileges, like her computer, work fine. The exact item taken away and the length of time vary depending on the offence. When she was younger, we also had her write lines.
Having an old-fashioned house meeting and setting out the rules on paper helped too. The rules were for all of us, not just her - we all have to knock before entering a bedroom, for example.
The rules that are specifically for her she has to write on a big piece of paper and put on the noticeboard in her room. She is genuinely very forgetful, but can’t ignore rules that are right in front of her.
Now that my GF’s moved in, we need to do all this again.
A parent at a school I worked in did exactly that, and it helped not only his kid, but the others in his class, too.
I don’t have teens, just little kids (3 and 6). For the little one, time outs. For the bigger one, removing privileges. So take away his playtime on the ipod or his tv time, that kind of thing.
Obviously, I may eat these words as my kids get older, but I don’t plan to ever let them have TV, video games, etc in their rooms as kids/teens. TV and video games are in the living room and probably will stay there. So I forsee going to their rooms being a decent punishment, followed by taking away their phone (which from what I understand from friends with older kids is A Big Deal). If they have a computer in their room, it will be easy enough to remove it (I’m assuming laptop, if they need a desktop for some reason, I’m not sure).
One thing to consider when making banishment to the bedroom a punishment is the subconscious association this makes between bedroom and unpleasant emotions like anger and resentment. I’m not fond of that; I want their room to be their refuge, their haven. Like, forgive me for the analogy, a crate is to a crate trained dog.
That’s not to say that I’ve never sent a kid to her room. I have. But it’s more along the lines of, “I’ve already told you that your shrieking hurts my ears and you need to not do that near me. If you’d like to shriek, please find a room with a door between us to shriek in. Or you can figure out another way to use your voice and stay here. Your choice.” That usually gets her into her bedroom, but sometimes she chooses one of the bathrooms instead. As long as she’s willing to vacate the bathroom if someone needs it, I’m okay with that.
The point, to me, is not that she be in her bedroom. It’s that she not be in my presence for a little bit right now. 