I dunno. I gues I’m used to the fact the my wief and I always talk before disciplining the boys, it keeps us from unduly harsh punishments.
A cornucopia of bad parenting!
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Don’t put your kids in situations where you expect them to screw up. If the kid’s too little to hold the kite by himself, don’t let him hold it! Kids do enough wrong on their own without manufacturing situations that are practically guaranteed to end in punishment. A big part of raising well-behaved kids is raising your kids to think of themselves as well-behaved. That means giving them as few opportunities as possible to misbehave.
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For a normal 3-year-old kid, parental disapproval is punishment enough. The kid was already reduced to tears – he got the point that he had screwed up. Leaving the beach was WAAAAYYY over the top. That’s the sort of punishment you reserve for sustained willful disobedience. Going nuclear right from the start doesn’t leave you any room to maneuver.
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Don’t act like a petulant child in front of your kids. If you want good behavior, model it. Allowing the kid to apologize and accepting it gracefully would have taught the kid a wonderful lesson. Refusing to accept an apology now means you’re not going to get one in the future.
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Discipline must be swift and certain, and followed up afterwards with love. Put him in time out, swat him if necessary, let him cry and apologize, and then give him a hug. And then it’s OVER. He’s served his time, now he gets to go free. That little kid probably cried all the way home. Instead of fifteen minutes of real discipline they got a ruined day at the beach and bad feelings all around.
Poor kid.
He’ll pay 'em back ten years from now though. In spades.
Gah, that’s so frustrating to read. It would have been so simple to head the whole ugly mess off before it got started. Parents are supposed to plan ahead for their kids to drop kites and stuff, that’s why they’re the adults.