Chapter 17 Chapter 3 Bringing It On: There's No Right Way to Do Something Wrong

For children, intimidation stimulates them to repeatedly do a thing they are not allowed to do.When a child is told: "If you do this again...", he doesn't hear the three words "if you", all he hears is "do this again".Sometimes he interprets this as: Mom wants me to do it again, or she'll be disappointed.Such warnings - which may be reasonable to adults - are not only useless, but worse.Children are sure to repeat those annoying behaviors.Warnings are challenges to a child's autonomy.If he had any self-respect, he would break the discipline again to show others that he wasn't afraid of any challenge.

Oliver was five years old and kept throwing balls at the glass of the living room window despite repeated warnings.Finally his father said, "If you throw the ball through the window again, I'll blow your eyes out, I promise." A minute later, the sound of shattering glass told Oliver's father the consequences of his warning: The ball landed on the glass one last time.After this series of threats, assurances, and misconduct, it's easy to imagine the consequences.The following incident is the opposite, dealing with misconduct without resorting to threats, let's see how that works.

Seven-year-old Peter shot his younger brother with a toy gun.His mother said, "Don't shoot your brother, shoot at the target." Peter shot his brother again, and his mother took the gun away and said to Peter, "People are not made to shoot." Peter's mother felt that she had done what she had to do to protect the baby, while at the same time being able to support her standards of acceptable behavior, and her son recognized the consequences of his actions without harming himself.The choice Mom hinted at was obvious: shoot at the target, or play without a gun.In this case, his mother avoided the usual parental mistake by taking the obvious path of failure: "Peter, stop! You can't think of anything better than shooting your brother." Don't you have a better target? If you do it again, listen, you do it again, and you'll never see the gun again!" Unless the child is tame, , to such warnings, his answer was to repeat the forbidden.There is no need to describe the next scene, any parent can easily imagine it.