Using anger to raise children - is this a bad idea?

[WhyNot]

@MandaJo

The perfect, consistent application of “consequences” to every infraction sends some odd messages: one, it can seem arbitrary because there doesn’t seem to be any REASON for not yelling in the house or whatever, since there’s no evidence it actually does any harm, just a rule and a consequence. It comes across as needlessly controlling, as if the rule were put in place out of a desire to control.

Agree. I mean, look at my username! The second rule of rules should be: If it’s not important, it shouldn’t be a rule. (The first is: make the rule to cover what you’re actually trying to prevent/encourage, not some vaguely related thing. That is, if you’re trying to curb underage drinking, make the penalties for underage drinking really damn harsh. Don’t put all kids under a curfew instead. The sneaks who are acting out won’t care about your rule, so only the good kids get punished!)

I parent, as much as possible, without any “rules” or artificial consequences (read: punishment) at all. Rather, I let nature take it’s course. Break a toy? Guess you don’t have that toy anymore. Decide to eat all the brownies at once? Guess you’re not going to have any more brownies this month. Don’t do your homework? Guess you’ll work it out with your teacher, and keep not doing your work and you’ll be spending another year in 6th grade.

Natural consequences aren’t punishment, they’re laws of nature, like gravity and conservation of energy. I’m just not going to bail your little butt out unless your little butt is in physical danger (or you ask me for help and compensate me in some way for it - forget your lunch? Sure, I’ll drive it into school. It will only cost you $1 for gas money and my time.)

But sometimes, the natural consequence of an action is that you piss people off. Sometimes, you piss Mom off. Am I going to yell and scream about it? No, that’s not my style. I *am *likely to freeze you out for some time until I calm down. That’s just how I deal with anger. (My kid’s other step/parents have their ways of dealing with anger. I’m not saying mine is the best way, but it’s the way it is.) I’m not very likely to do you any favors while I’m still angry - not because it’s a punishment, but because the natural consequence of making someone angry is that they’re not likely to do you any favors.

@Lakai

When I brought up this issue with her, she defends her anger in two ways:

1. She tells me that I should stop being a pussy and just deal with it.

2. She tells me that if she didn’t get angry, neither me or my brother would have listened to her.

OK, number one is just not an acceptable thing for any person to say to any other person, ever. Talk about dismissing your feelings! But number 2, I do sympathize with her on. I’ve sometimes found myself feeling the same thing. I’ve found it’s even more effective, however, to take a deep breath, get down to eye level and say, “You know, this is starting to feel like one of those times when you don’t listen, and so I repeat it, and you don’t listen, and so I yell, and then you listen. How 'bout we just skip to the end part and you listen, okay?” Oddly enough, this is *really *effective, even with kids as young as 4 and 5. They’ll even giggle sometimes, and agree that we can “skip the middle” 'cause it’s so absurd.

@kanicbird

I think she has childhood issues that may involve not being heard, which brought on frustration and finally anger which got her heard. She has not learned to move past this and no inflicts this on her children in a different way.

I agree.

[elbows]

When you ‘teach’ your children this way, you’re really teaching them to respond to being bullied. Mother’s like this often are shocked to see their daughters fall into abusive relationships, but it should be no surprise. We are all drawn to that which is familiar. The mother can’t understand why the daughter won’t stand up for herself. Mother thinks she was strong and demonstrated it to her daughter. When really, she was a bully, who taught her child to respond to bullying as the norm. When daughter comes across it in a man, it will feel warmly familiar, in some way. It’s a dynamic she knows well.

[Nava]

@raspberry_hunter

! Is your brother my mom? (uh, I guess not ) Added to which, I didn’t even realize this until their last visit, but my mom tends to give instructions with only half of it defined precisely and the other half with abstract placeholders (e.g., “Could you bring me the thing that does things …in the kitchen?”) and will get mad when you don’t follow the instructions.

(When I was a kid, I’d sort of stand there dumbly and get yelled at, or try to follow directions to the best of my ability and get it wrong and then get yelled at. An embarrassingly recent development was realizing that I could actually ask her to clarify the instructions, and she generally will, though if she’s in a bad mood the clarification may go something like “Any idiot should know that I mean the spatula, what else would I mean?”)

You know, you just made me realize that I need to teach the Kid the magic words. No, not those magic words (“please”), but the other ones (“now in Understandablish?”). My mother, and her mother, counter with “I speak for smart people” and we counter with “so you shouldn’t’a made me dumb, file a complaint with yourself, and now howzabout getting the instructions again in Understandablish?”

Yep. The Kid isn’t old enough to ask for “subject, verb and complements :rolleyes:” (since he doesn’t know what those are yet), but he’s old enough to start saying “sorry, I don’t understand. Please explain.” I’ll make sure to teach him the ultrapolite version first so his parents can’t find any excuses to complain… ah, the joys of Auntship: you get to screw up your siblings in new and improved ways, and you can even claim you’re Performing A Good Action!
(Mom does prioritize; heck, she gives us instructions one by one if we’re not careful to remind her we’re old enough to schedule ourselves, but yeah, she and Grandma do the “pass me the thing” too)

[JohnT]

@Leaffan

As a parent you get really, really tired of having to say the same damned things over and over to little people who you know are intelligent enough to understand what you’re asking of them, but who choose to ignore you anyway.

There’s only so much effort I should put into asking you to clean your damned room, and the fifth time I come in you’re still sitting on your bed texting a friend, instead of cleaning your damned room like I’ve politely asked 5 times already.

You bet I’m angry.

This

QFT

+1

And it’s not like we’re varying the routine - to get to school my daughter has to do four things in a 50-minute span:

1. Get dressed
2. Make bed
3. Eat
4. Let the dog out into the back yard

And Laura has to prompt her every… single… morning on every… single… item. Anyone want to guess if she gets tired of this?

[perfectparanoia]

@puddleglum

Many parents use anger to signal seriousness and that the request should be done now. Since the children come to know that requests that do not use anger are not serious they ignore the requests till the anger comes. This has many bad repurcussions. If punishment comes it is done in anger and may be out of proportion to the infraction. The parent spends much of the time being mad and that is stressful. The child learns to associate interacting with the parent with anger and fear. All of this is very damaging to the relationship which should be the principal source of joy in life.
It is not necessary since all that needs to be done is to find an alternate signal of seriousness. When I was working in childcare, I used counting. My class knew that once I started counting if I reached 5 then the punishment would be used. The result of this was that I almost never got to 5 and I never had to yell, scream, or threaten. I still got angry but that anger was rare and I never had to get angry over something trivial.

No kids, eh?

I worked in child care and thought I knew what I was getting into with this parenting thing. Boy, was I wrong. They have a way of knowing exactly how to push your buttons and drain the well of patience that you have worked so hard to maintain. You WILL get angry at your kids. There WILL be times when you lose your shit. You WILL feel badly about it.

Sometimes, I can walk away before I lose it. Sometimes, I will send them to their room while I calm down before I dole out punishment. However, sometimes, I get angry and they see it. I will apologize (as I would expect them to) but parents are human, after all.

(Suddenly when I became a Mom my fallibility card was revoked and society keeps reinforcing this.)

[Leaffan]

@JohnT

This

QFT

+1

And it’s not like we’re varying the routine - to get to school my daughter has to do four things in a 50-minute span:

1. Get dressed
2. Make bed
3. Eat
4. Let the dog out into the back yard

And Laura has to prompt her every… single… morning on every… single… item. Anyone want to guess if she gets tired of this?

@perfectparanoia

No kids, eh?

I worked in child care and thought I knew what I was getting into with this parenting thing. Boy, was I wrong. They have a way of knowing exactly how to push your buttons and drain the well of patience that you have worked so hard to maintain. You WILL get angry at your kids. There WILL be times when you lose your shit. You WILL feel badly about it.

Sometimes, I can walk away before I lose it. Sometimes, I will send them to their room while I calm down before I dole out punishment. However, sometimes, I get angry and they see it. I will apologize (as I would expect them to) but parents are human, after all.

(Suddenly when I became a Mom my fallibility card was revoked and society keeps reinforcing this.)

A-fucking-men.

[tr0psn4j]

It’s a tool and you should use it once in a while. Obviously it will lose it’s effectiveness each with each successive use but I don’t see why it would be bad to have a few tactical anger fits.

I’m not a parent though!

[Rhythmdvl]

New parent here. Dudeling is a bit over two and is still transforming from stationary carbon blob to human.

What’s anger? No, really. We’ve yet to be in a situation where clearly identifiable anger has been in the air, but as with any test-the-limits person sometimes the first few “don’t climb on thats” don’t get through. I’ve been working on my Daddy Voice (challenges include not cracking a smile because even though he’s being technically naughty he’s doing it very cutely) for a while, and he even knows what’s up. There’s things like several iterations of “Dudeling, you need to get in bed now,” followed by “if you don’t get in bed I’m going to have to elevate to Daddy Voice Level One.” Just that often works, but sometimes I have to go to DadCon Level One, and have even gotten to DCL3 for a half a sentence. I’ve come close to making him cry, but so far so good.

The various DadCon levels include progressively harsher tones, a sterner voice, and increased volumes. Serious stuff. Is that “getting angry” with the Dudeling? When he does get old enough to push buttons, is quicker elevation of DadCon tantamount to anger?

And what about threats? We’ve been told not to threaten him with things we won’t follow through on, but so far a mixture of things has worked. The ‘Square of Shame’ (or Corner, or Circle, or whatever area is handy) works very well as a threat (is that anger?) and he hasn’t had to go in it for more than a minute so far, but we’ve introduced things like the ‘Basement of Woe’ and the ‘Sofa of Dooooom!’ These have been very effective, but only when we’re at least at DadCon Level 1. Anger?

Again, he’s only two so our experience is only what we’ve seen in movies and television (and being the misanthropic curmudgeons we are means that’s very limited) so don’t know what the hell we’re doing. Where is the line between sternness and anger?

[Leaffan]

@Rhythmdvl

New parent here. Dudeling is a bit over two and is still transforming from stationary carbon blob to human. …

Come back and resurrect this thread in about 10 years. Most of the time, most kids are good, and will mostly listen to most instructions, most of the time.

In my experience kids up to about 6 or 8 still want to do everything to please mommy and daddy and there’s never any reason to let things escalate.

Somewhere around 10 - 12 years old they get abducted by aliens and replaced with exact duplicates who forget everything you’ve taught them and who start to talk back and become totally disrespectful and assholish. Oh yes. That little baby whose diaper you changed for a year, who turned you into a sleepless zombie, and who rode on your shoulders and treated you like a God for years turns into someone you don’t even want to be in the same room with.

Both my wife and I have turned into insane, frothing at the mouth, watering eyed, quivering, Charles Manson-like lunatics bordering on bouts of myocardial infarction with enough adrenaline in our veins to lift the front end of a Mack Truck. It doesn’t happen often, and thankfully (for us) it seems to be on the decline.

Some kids are better; some kids are worse. I think ours will be perfectly fine in the long run. But, holy shit, be prepared to have your buttons pushed for a while.

[perfectparanoia]

@Leaffan

Both my wife and I have turned into insane, frothing at the mouth, watering eyed, quivering, Charles Manson-like lunatics bordering on bouts of myocardial infarction with enough adrenaline in our veins to lift the front end of a Mack Truck.

This turn of phrase is quite amusing. Well, it was for a moment until I realized how accurate it is.

[Rhythmdvl]

@Leaffan

Come back and resurrect this thread in about 10 years. Most of the time, most kids are good, and will mostly listen to most instructions, most of the time.

We are in for some serious shit.

We’ve been considering every good thing he’s done as some part of an elaborate plan to get us off balance and to let our guard down. We’ve yet to get to the stage where we’ve had any real input on his behaviour, but so far childcare has been a cakewalk. He was sleeping through the night by three months. He woke up in the middle of the night exactly once so far, and went back to sleep within two minutes of mollycoddling. He’s yet to cry for longer than five minutes. Eats freakin’ Brussels sprouts. He’s totally setting us up for when he gets to his teens.

It’s the whole parental curse–that someday my child will do to me what I did to my parents.

We’re so fucked.

So where’s the line between getting angry and “using anger to raise children”?

[msmith537]

But it must have been fun growing up with Dewey, Malcome and Reece!
There’s a difference between speaking in a lound, stern but controlled tone and out of control anger because you can’t get the results you are looking for.

Try this approach. Sit your child down. Calmly, but firmly tell them their behavior is not appropriate and that you will not accept it.
Then calmly smash one of their Playstation3 games in front of them!

[elbows]

Sometimes, I can walk away before I lose it. Sometimes, I will send them to their room while I calm down before I dole out punishment. However, sometimes, I get angry and they see it. I will apologize (as I would expect them to) but parents are human, after all.

Surely you’re aware that this is not what the OP is talking about. All parents sometimes lose their shit. That’s because they are people not machines. I think we all agree on that.

The OP seemed to have referenced anger as the go to strategy. That’s a far cry from the stuff that some of you are talking about. It seems defensive in nature, where there is no need.

[Leaffan]

@elbows

Surely you’re aware that this is not what the OP is talking about. All parents sometimes lose their shit. That’s because they are people not machines. I think we all agree on that.

The OP seemed to have referenced anger as the go to strategy. That’s a far cry from the stuff that some of you are talking about. It seems defensive in nature, where there is no need.

Nah. We’re just using this thread to vent with other parents and feel comfortable in the fact that we’re not the only ones who’ve gone “kookoo for cocoa puffs” on occasion.

[Spice_Weasel]

@Lakai

2. She tells me that if she didn’t get angry, neither me or my brother would have listened to her.

Yeah, that’s how my mother justified threatening to kill me. It was the only way I would listen.

As someone who grew up in a virtual sea of anger, I would have to say I don’t think it’s a very good idea to try to control your children that way.

There’s a difference between being angry and expressing anger. Being angry is normal and can’t be controlled. Expressing anger may or may not be appropriate in a given situation and responsible parents ought to know the difference. I’m not without sympathy for the parents involved. IME when a parent screams in anger at a child, it means that parent is overwhelmed and completely out of productive ways to cope. What is needed is intervention, not crucifixion.

[Hello_Again]

@Leaffan

Nah. We’re just using this thread to vent with other parents and feel comfortable in the fact that we’re not the only ones who’ve gone “kookoo for cocoa puffs” on occasion.

Well, that’s not terribly responsive to the OP, who questions anger as the ONLY discipline strategy:

What if you just don’t know how to get kids to behave without anger? How are you supposed to learn? And if you don’t know, is it acceptable to use anger to achieve compliance?

We all know people who can’t discipline their children (or their dogs or their horses) without pitching a fit, EVER. It is normal (and strategically effective, when applied judiciously) for parents to become frustrated and lose their temper. Not so normal: screaming with fury as your day-in, day-out disciplinary strategy. It’s incredibly ineffective as “frothing” when applied habitually just becomes the new normal.

The cleverest of children will become little passive-resistant Bartlebys and set you off for their own amusement.

[elfkin477]

@raspberry_hunter

! Is your brother my mom? (uh, I guess not ) Added to which, I didn’t even realize this until their last visit, but my mom tends to give instructions with only half of it defined precisely and the other half with abstract placeholders (e.g., “Could you bring me the thing that does things …in the kitchen?”) and will get mad when you don’t follow the instructions.

(When I was a kid, I’d sort of stand there dumbly and get yelled at, or try to follow directions to the best of my ability and get it wrong and then get yelled at. An embarrassingly recent development was realizing that I could actually ask her to clarify the instructions, and she generally will, though if she’s in a bad mood the clarification may go something like “Any idiot should know that I mean the spatula, what else would I mean?”)

I have a sister?!

No, “you know, that thing@” is not enough of a clue for me to have any idea what the hell you’re talking about, Mom, so acting like a put-upon victim when I haven’t a damn clue is not very becoming.

[slm2955]

Horrible idea. Nothing good will come out of that, you will either have hostile or suicidal children…

[Indygrrl]

@Nava

It’s normal to get angry occasionally, but it’s not something which should be part of a child’s daily life. The kid will learn how to deal with anger from watching the parent, a parent whose response to a pin dropping is a window-rattling yelling session isn’t teaching the kid very well, is he?

I agree with this. I grew up getting screamed at over everything from my dad. He gets disproportionately angry over things, and I can honestly say it’s absolute hell to live like that. And it also led me to deal with my frustration the same way. I’m 37-years-old and it’s taken my entire adult life to try to undo the bad habits my dad instilled in me. He has a special talent for knowing the most hurtful thing to say to us, and he used that no matter what we did. This continued into adulthood, and I had to sever ties with my dad almost two years ago.

The occasional raised voice is one thing, but raising children in an environment of anger is unhealthy and damaging.

[Rhythmdvl]

Man, this thread makes me want to go in there, wake him up, and hug the stuffing out of the Dudeling. It’s so nice to get perspective from future, past and non parents—Doper future, past and non parents. I’ve yet to find a parenting board to look things up on that comes even close to the sensibilities (and lack of DH/DS/DD abbreviations) that are here.

Yeah, I’m going to go wake him up to squoosh him and promise him that though I’ll get angry from time to time, I’ll always love him and I promise not to use anger as a primary parenting method.

Anyone have good tips as to how to use passive aggressiveness as a parenting technique?