I like to think that I’m effective at disciplining my children. I don’t much go for corporal punishment, and taking away allowances and restrictions seem too routine to me. Not that I’m against taking away allowance, such as when one of my boys intentionally destroyed anothers toy. But as a rule, I tend to want to teach a lesson when I have to disipline my kids.
A good example is fighting. Want to know the punishment for fighting in Kingdom Stuffy? The two combatants must link arms then place the hand of the linked arm in their pocket. This typically last 15-20 minutes.
If there is a cardinal sin in my household it’s this:
THOU SHALT NOT SCREW UP IN SCHOOL.
Which brings us to today. Jock managed to get himself a two day suspension, with today counting as one. So tommorrow, Jock gets to work. As it happens, the building super is my grandfather. Tommorrow he gets to take it easy, while Jock does the cleaning, pruning and general grunt work that needs to be done around our 40 unit apartment building.
Yep, I’m pure evil! <insert evil laugh>
So is anyone else a little unusual in the methods of discipline.
I once was banned from reading. Before any teachers here have a heart attack, I’ve been reading since I was four (and it could have been earlier, I just started reading out loud one day and that’s how my mom found out, nobody actually taught me) and am a book-a-day sort of reader. So it’s not like I was banned from something I didn’t like that much anyway. It’s sort of like taking away…breathing. Or the SDMB. We’re talking torture here, the sort that leaves no marks. g
I think I only made it a day or so before I got caught with a book anyway. But it was a creative sort of punishment.
I remember when my mom made us kids hug for fighting. It’s damn hard to hug a person you are so made at for 20 minutes.
My most creative punishment was to make the kids clean each others rooms. My son is always saying that he doesn’t make the mess in his room, and the girls always say that my son got all their toys out. Instead of listening to them fight over who made the mess in each others rooms, I had them go to opposite rooms and clean.
mistee: my father did this when my brother and I were fairly young. In retrospect, he should have done this every time my brother and I were fighting, even in our latter teen years.
whiterabbit: God, how I feel your pain. I may never become a smoker or an alcoholic, but it takes a real effort to not carry a book on me at all times. (Thank god for the Palm Pilot!).
Well, last weekend my step-son spent his visit cleaning all the dog poop out of our yard (2 big dogs + 2 months of no cleaning up = lots of poop). We found out he was failing math and lying about it, so DH gave him some math problems to do and for every one wrong he had to clean the number of piles his answer was off by.
I slammed a door once (actually, more than once) and my Dad made me stand there and open and close the door properly 100 times. That was a real pisser.
Once, we were on a road trip to Arizona. Round about Missouri, the three of us started whining, carrying on, and with the whole “He’s looking at me! He’s looking at me!” thing. My Dad gave us five miles to beat the shit out of each other with no intervention from the parental units, and after that we had to behave ourselves. Oddly, no blood was drawn and we got along much better for the remainder of the trip.
This one is my personal favorite (and also the most bizarre punishment I’ve ever heard of):
My cousins were fighting like maniacs. They were beating on each other with hairbrushes, trying to claw each other’s eyes out, threatening to toss each other down the stairs.
My aunt made them both drop trou and look at their own…er…female parts. :eek: They both started laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing and forgot what they were fighting about.
My mom also made us hug for fighting; fortunately, she didn’t think of it often.
I was also grounded from reading; however, the idea was given up pretty quickly when it became obvious I was just not able to stop. (It is analogous to breathing!)
I always strive to connect the punishment with the crime in some way, as well. For instance, if the kids forget their books at school and are thus unable to do their homework, I whip out some books of my own and assign them more homework than their teachers would.
I like this, Kalhoun. Unfortunately, my kids aren’t even close to being evenly matched.
And an oldie but a goodie: Writing sentences. I remember Dinsdale once posting about an essay assignment he gave one of his kids, and that sounded pretty good.
I made a 14 year old copy sentences out of Bartletts’ Book of Familiar Quotations that were relative to the ‘crime’- such as all the quotes on honesty, dishonestly, lying, truthfulness, etc. I made him copy each quote three times in case he ‘turned his brain off’.
He wasn’t my child, and I didn’t like punishing him, but got stuck with the job on occasion.
His mom grounded him alot, which seems to me to be punishing the whole family since noone can go anywhere and everyone has to stay home and make sure the kid stays grounded and has no fun.
My parents never grounded me. They’d just send me to my room. (Oh no! I’ve only got a t.v, videos, loads of books and a c.d player. What can I POSSIBLY spend my time doing?) Then after about 10 mins they’d usually come up and apologise for yelling at me.
They banned me from the computer a couple of times. No THAT was punishment!
The book thing only happened once. But isn’t it a terrifying idea? I’ll have to keep it in mind if I ever have any little bookworms of my own. Heh heh heh.
When my son was a second grader, he and a buddy got involved in a bit of horseplay on the bus ride home, and wound up in the principal’s office for fighting (unwarranted, BTW). I got called at work at 2:30 in the afternoon to come get him and take him home.
I didn’t go after him until I was scheduled to end the day, which was 4:30. He had to sit there for two hours stewing in his own juices, and his imagination has always been worse than my reaction.
One other time, I confiscated all the power cords to his electronic toys to enforce a grounding for deliberately blowing off his homework.
One of the Kunilou kids decided one night to smoke something illegal, then drive home. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of getting lost on the drive home, arrived home an hour late and tried to excuse his way out of it by saying he was waiting for his brother – who had been home for more than an hour.
Of course we took away his driving privileges, but I also ordered him to research at least one pro- and one anti-marijuana source, write me a report on driving under the influence and tell me what the law would have done if he had been caught driving under the influence.
The nice folks at NORML are not in favor of driving while stoned, and that had a lot more influence on his future decisions than any lecture or grounding we could have given him.
When the kids were a lot younger, we used to pick up all the toys they hadn’t cleaned up, put them in a box and make the kids “buy” them back by doing chores. Seemed like a great idea, but it never worked.
Well. Um. I duct-taped my children’s hands together.
Briefly! Briefly! I know, it was awful. It was the third day of summer vacation, already way too hot, and they’d been fighting non-stop since school let out. I had absolutely had it with both of their horrid, crabby, disputatious ways.
They had to sit down and hold hands. I then wound duct-tape around the clasped hands. (Just one set, obviously: 1 hand per kid). They had to sit there about five minutes that way, then get up and – still taped together – pick up the mess they’d made in the family room.
After a total of fifteen minutes, I de-taped them. It was hot and they were sweaty, so no tape stuck to their little hands or anything. By the end of the fifteen minutes, they were giggling as they tried to pick things up and put them away. Both mentioned that it was tough to work together that way. The fighting got a whole lot better after that.
Is this abusive? Possibly. Honestly, I was at my wits’ end. Next time I’ll try the hugging thing. That sounds like a much better idea. :rolleyes:
here’s the best I have heard of. Advice given to a solo mum with three young teen boys. Apparently she followed it and it worked.
It seems the boys were parcticing teenage selfishness and arrogance with a bit of chauvanism thrown in. They would complain about the food their mother cooked, generally harass her, refuse to eat, raid the pantry for whatever they felt like, and refused outright to clean up anything in the kitchen – either after themselves or after their mother had cooked for them.
Here’s the remedy.
Kids come home from school one day. Mum is dressed to the nines. Nice makeup and jewellery. She announces to the boys a change of plans. “You’re sick of cleaning up. Fine. You don’t have to clean up. I’m sick of cooking. So I am not going to spend any time cooking.” She produces a pile of paper plates, plastic forks and a big rubbish bag to throw everything in when it is done. She continues, “From now on, we are going to eat bush stew.” That is, meat, potatoes vegetables, unwashed, unchopped all thrown in together in a big pot and the crap bioled out of it. Big dollops of it appear army-style on the paper plates. At the end of the meal, all the plates go directly into the rubbish sack, and any leftovers stay in the pot, which goes in the fridge and is used as a starter for the following night’s meal.
That’s what they eat for three days.
After three days she tackles the boys head on. “What say we cut a deal? I’ll cook good food. You will eat it and thank me and help with cleaning up afterwards. And once a week each of you will have a cook night when I will spend time with you in the kitchen and teach you how to cook meals that you like.”
