This parenting style has pros & cons, but it's the most effective IMO

In My Humble Opinion
1

Being 21 years old, I came to realize that discipline comes in all different forms. However, I recently thought of the perfect way to teach your kids or teens how to act more appropriate for their age:

Let them learn through the mistakes that they make. Now, this all depends on the situation. In fact, this is something that only affects them temporarily. I’d also show them videos of public, social experiments on YouTube: JoeySalads, Coby Persin, etc. Even though some of these videos have mixed reviews, just telling them to watch out may or may not work for some children/teenagers. Going further, you can also tell them that their mistakes can negatively affect you as well.

Examples include:

  • Telling them to go to bed, but not enforcing it. So, if they stay up, sleep in, and miss the bus or work, then it’ll be on the both of you (especially missing school).

  • Telling them to do homework or study for a test. If they refuse, then their grades will be negatively affected.

Basically: telling them to do almost anything that doesn’t put them in harm’s way. But, if they refuse to do so, then it’ll be on the both of you.

Now, if they continue to struggle, then adjusting your discipline towards them would be an option if it starts become a bigger problem for you.

On an extra note, I’d also sit down with them & explain this form of discipline: How it negatively affects the both of you.

2

If you are 21, you’ve grown up with a YouTube video for everything.
Parenting does not being at the point where kids can understand videos, it begins at the very beginning. Building good habits in elementary school is going to do a lot more than showing videos in high school.
Setting expectations, being available, and giving some freedom worked pretty well for me. Letting kids fail is fine - maybe once - but you need to distinguish that from washing your hands of the kid. Some kids may grow used to failure and not know how to get out of it even if they want to.
My credentials - two very successful kids in their 30s. Kids are different also. My older kid was sure I was pressing her to succeed, where she was really pressing herself to succeed. (I didn’t press her because I knew it was unnecessary.) My second was a lot more rational about things.

3

It depends on the kid. The lil’wrekker did more to strive than I ever would have pushed.
It wasn’t necessary. If fact I had to pull her back some. She over filled her plate. Still does.
Oldest was happy-go-lucky class clown. Now I sat on him. He would have never cracked a book otherwise. Mid girl was my rebel. If I said ‘in’ she said ‘out’, she just could not cooperate. They are all 3 successful. Well, lil’wrekker is still in college, but she’s a very good student. I don’t think any YouTube video would be able to speak to all 3. They’re so different. There is no formula to raise children. Consistency is the key.

4

I agree that letting the kid make mistakes, and suffer (some) of the consequences, is important — I wish my mother had let me do more of this. Not so much about not doing homework or whatever (I was a nerd), but as a way to learn practical life skills.
One realm this doesn’t work so well in is teaching how to interact with people — being social and attentive with someone you just met, etc. For that sort of thing, the penalties for failing to do it don’t happen right away — it’s too easy to just withdraw or be aloof. That needs to be actively taught and reminded about in near-real-time.

5

Who gets to define what is “appropriate for their age”?

6

On occasion, each of my 3 kids, after having attained adulthood, took the opportunity to tell their mother and me how we had fucked up as parents. (Yeah - we were far from perfect - but all 3 kids graduated from college, are financially independent, and are in longterm relationships - so we COULD have done worse!)

As I told my oldest when she had her kid, “Congratulations! Now you have the opportunity to fuck your kid up however you wish!”

So if that is how the OP or anyone else wishes to raise their kid - more power to them.

One observation, tho - the kid isn’t the only member of the family who has to deal with their mistakes. As a parent, you have plenty of demands on your time. In at least some instances, I would choose to insist that a kid do something one way or another, rather than having to deal down the line with expected and easily avoidable hassles related to an immature person’s questionable decision-making.

In some situations, I’m not sure the lesson learned is sufficient to outweigh the consequences. One example would be bad grades which negatively impact future eligibility for placement, extracurriculars, admission… How quickly can you expect each person to learn the valuable lesson - and how significant would the negative impact be before that lesson is learned?

Also, in many situations, I think a valuable lesson to teach kids is, “Do it THIS WAY NOW, because I am the person with the authority to make the decision, and my decision is based on my having greater experience than you, and greater responsibility should anything go wrong.”

Like I said, no parent is perfect, and each parent has considerable freedom to fuck up their kids however they wish. Go forth and multiply!

7

Let’s try this…

When you become a parent, you experiment as you suggested, and when you fail, you can learn from your mistakes. You will course correct, etc. etc.

Since there is no parenting manual from the hospital, that you get when your baby is born, it is all trial and error.

Good luck!

8

When my adult kids told me of some horrible mistake I made while raising them, I decided that so long as I was confident that whatever choice/action I decided upon was well-intended, based on my best information and my resources at the time, and was not the result of laziness, selfishness, etc, I could live with it.

Yeah, I fucked up all the time. But it wasn’t for lack of effort. Sure, I coulda done better. (Ya know what? So could the kids!) But they sure coulda done worse, and they ended up all right.

9

There is no one way to parent. Between my fiancee and I, we have 4 kids and three of them are very young.

My oldest is as sweet as can be and very smart but a relatively bad student with ADHD.

Her oldest is brilliant by any measure for a 10 year old but rude as hell - she has to be constantly corrected on her poor behavior.

My youngest is a great athlete and student but treats her friends like crap in a rotating circle. She has to be corrected in that.

Her youngest is the real challenge. He is adopted and has Special Needs. He was born drug addicted to everything and has defiant personality disorder. The local schools are debating whether to even let him into Kindergarten full time. He kicked me down backwards on a large staircase a few weeks ago and then ran a garden hose into the house and turned it on out of spite last week.

If you have a Youtube video that can neatly tell you how to handle very different needs, I am all for it. Then again, you are 21 and I have only been doing this for close to two decades so I am all ears.

10

Being 21, I think you’re missing an important detail: for a lot of teens and kids, “acting like an imbecile” is completely appropriate for their age.

11

First some requisite snark: the only perfect parent is the one who has not yet had children. As soon as they are born we start to make mistakes. Fortunately most of them have enough intrinsic strengths that they come out okay despite us. As a parent most of my goal has been not to screw them up too much, not to get too much in the way of them becoming the best versions of themselves they can be. Not as easy as it sounds, but I think they’ve each had enough strengths that they are turning out okay.

That said there is lots to be said for letting kids learn from natural consequences and from example. We need to provide the safety rails so that those mistakes are ones that they can recover from but we do them a disservice if we protect them from failures and from learning from those failures. And for the failures that have longer term consequences, ones too delayed for them to think of as meaningful for where they are, we need to provide more immediate consequential feedback.

The op might however be interested in reading about the differences between"authoritative", “authoritarian” and “permissive” parenting styles.

12

I’m quite familiar with those styles since I took a psychology course in college. My mother is more of an authoritative parent, while my father is quite the opposite.

13

One difficulty is that sometimes, it takes a while for the natural consequences to manifest. So your kid doesn’t study, and as a result gets a bad grade on a test: But what if the kid doesn’t care about bad grades? The consequence of that is that, years down the line, they’ll have a harder time getting into college and into the job they want, but by the time that consequence has manifested, it’s much harder to fix the problem. It’s parents’ job to steer their kids onto the right course before it becomes too late to fix. How do you do that? I dunno.

14

Exactly.

My wife and I have always been very involved with our son. Many people would probably consider us to be helicopter parents (but hopefully not snowplow parents). But we managed to give him some good habits, like doing his homework immediately when he got home. He went off to college, and just graduated with a B.S. in Civil Engineering.

I have a friend who took a very different approach to parenting – one that I jokingly call “benign neglect.” :wink: His kids were never made to do their homework, or anything else. The middle son is also friends with my son, so I know him pretty well. He is a very smart kid, but was pretty aimless in school. I encouraged him to apply to the local state university, and he got in, later telling me that he probably wouldn’t have applied if I hadn’t encouraged him to do so. Unfortunately, he had no discipline to do his schoolwork at the university, and so he dropped out after a couple of semesters. He’s now working for his father (who also never went to college, but who is very smart in a self-taught sort of way), so hopefully he can pull it together. As I told my son, though, he’ll have a harder path without that degree.

15

Didn’t know who these people were so I went and had a look. You are absolutely not ready to be a parent, my friend. Just say “no.” I saw nothing of value to teaching a child how to be a good person in those videos.

I will say though, that to a certain extent letting a child suffer their natural consequences is useful.

16

I got my degree in psychology. (And while I don’t have children, I’ve had 35 years post-degree to see how this has worked relative to how I was brought up) What you are talking about is essentially operant conditioning.

The issue when attempting to use operant conditioning in the form you are describing, is that rewards or punishments that occur closer to the behavior are stronger than rewards that are more removed in time. The other issue is that people place different values on different rewards and punishments.

Note: I have ADHD-PI, and I’ve attempted to use operant conditioning on myself for years to improve habits, with mixed results.
Let’s take brushing your teeth. The consequence of not brushing your teeth is cavities and bad breath.

But, no one really experiences their own bad breath. Cavities don’t impact a person until you go to a dentist (getting a filling) or the tooth is so far gone that you are getting a toothache. Thus, at best, cavities will not negatively impact a person until at least a couple of months of not brushing teeth occur.

Meanwhile, brushing your teeth has immediate negative consequence - at best it’s boring. Toothpaste can have an unpleasant taste and texture. It’s keeping a person from doing more pleasant things like gaming or sleeping.

To establish a good tooth-brushing habit in your child, you’re going to have to fix the immediate negative consequences - make sure they like the flavor of the toothpaste, or at least don’t actively hate it, and engage with them while they brush their teeth, or make it a game while they are young. Tell them their post-brushing breath smells good (positive reinforcement).

Adults have a hard time responding to delayed gratification when there is available immediate gratification.

Children, for whom a couple of months is a much bigger chunk of their life in comparison to your life, are going to be abysmal at delayed gratification.

If you rely on rewards/negative consequences that only occur after extended periods of time, what you will find is that those rewards are not very effective.
The second issue - placing different values on different rewards.

When I was having problems in school, my parents took me to a place in Fort Worth that specialized in childhood problems. The therapist I saw did not diagnose me with ADHD, but instead “the worst case of passive-aggression he had ever seen” (I hope he had worse problems with his own children.)

One thing he recommended to my parents (which I don’t even remember this happening) was to reward me with money when I did something right.

Didn’t work. Money didn’t mean anything to me.

What did work was a couple of years later my parents decided to let us choose places to eat when we did well on our report cards. Best grades I got for my entire school career was the year they did that. What they were rewarding us with was control - which was probably the thing that, as the youngest, I had the least of otherwise.

Another big possible reward that a lot of parents don’t realize is the reward of attention. Take a kid that is always acting up, and there’s a good possibility that they need attention, and that is the only way they will get it, or possibly the only way they know how to get it.

17

The parents and the child. It isn’t necessary for the parents to make this decision in a vacuum, as they can rely on the advice and experience of others.

I believe the original quote is from a Prussian general, and is frequently paraphrased as, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

Allowing kids to learn from their mistakes is a central tenant of books such as Parenting with Love & Logic. The idea is to let kids experience the natural consequence of their decisions. One of the ideas is that it is important that the kid figure out the consequence on their own—explaining the consequence is counterproductive. Letting the child know that the parent is disappointed, sad, angry, inconvenienced, etc. as one of the consequences is perfectly rational.

My main problem with this, and perhaps it is just my lack of understanding of the method, is that it can fall apart when the kids just don’t care about the consequences. They may understand them perfectly well, but just don’t care.

Also, consequences are not punishments. Punishment: if you pull the cat’s tail, I’ll take away your tablet. Consequence: if you don’t plug in your tablet, it’s battery will die and you can’t watch it.

18

Chronos made a good point about the long lag between action and consequence.

A lot of kids are able to skate by on the bare minimum. Maybe they have a golden halo because they are smart. Or maybe they have one because they fit the profile of a smart kid. So they goof off in class and the teacher cuts them a break because “aw, he’s just bored”. Or they get away with petty crimes because ,“oh, he didn’t mean no harm.”

But then that kid stops being a kid and he’s out in the real world. And suddenly all the slack that he was given as a kid is gone. No one cares that he comes from a good family and he’s got a charming smile. No one cares that he has an IQ score in the 95th percentile. All they care about is performance. By the time he figures out that he needs up to up his game, doors to certain opportunities have closed up and it’s gonna be real hard for him to re-open them.

So a parent who doesn’t want to financially support a 30-something adult has a vested interest in making sure their kids get pushed and prodded a little. I think the art of good parenting is knowing when to back off and when to push and prod. Not just going with the extremes. The extremes are actually easier than finding the happy medium.

19

Which is quite the opposite of authoritative? Permissive or authoritarian? Or just neglectful? Seriously I can’t figure that out. In any case having parents on very different parenting philosophy pages is almost always going to be a problem, and not just for the child.

Mind you parents are often on different paragraphs …

And since you have taken that psychology class in college, where in that spectrum of parenting approaches would you place just letting them learn through the mistakes that they make, and showing some YouTube clips?

I’m having a hard time figuring out if it is in the permissive or the neglectful camps. Pretty sure though it is one of those. It seems to be a reaction against authoritarian parenting more than anything else.

Yes, our kids often do best when they experience meaningful (to them at that age) and fairly immediate natural consequences for their decisions, decisions they “own”, and have the chance to learn from their mistakes, safely. The tricky part is implementing that in consistent and developmentally appropriate ways. Often very tricky.

FWIW I was raised more by benign neglect just because a the youngest of five they had pretty much given up by me. Given the option of that or authoritarian I’d choose benign neglect. They are not the only two choices though.

20

Some of their social experiments are useful for all ages:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=joey+salads+social+experiment

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=coby+persin+social+experiment