Ditch the timeouts and reward charts
Psychologist advises parents to try to identify why children are misbehaving
As a parent of a four- and a twoyear-old, there’s rarely a time in our household when at least one isn’t misbehaving. Whether they’re fighting over toys, jumping on the beds and couches or otherwise terrorizing each other, my wife and I are constantly stepping in to restore order.
It’s even more difficult when we’re in a hurry, but we’re held up at the door. Perhaps one of the kids is holding a sit-in in her bedroom until she’s allowed to wear her favourite dress. Or maybe our two-year-old is throwing a tantrum because one of us dared help her fasten a button.
How do you react in these situations? Do you yell and threaten to take away all sorts of privileges until they fall in line? Do you bribe them with treats, stickers or other goodies until they do what you want them to do?
If you tend to resort to any of the above, you’re certainly not alone. But in the long run, you may be causing your kids more harm than good.
According to Dr. Vanessa Lapointe, psychologist and author of Discipline Without Damage: How to Get Your Kids to Behave Without Messing Them Up (LifeTree Media, 2016), many parents have become so focused on behaviours they’re not making the effort to address what’s causing them.
What we need instead, she argues, is to let compassion and understanding guide us to make more effective decisions with our kids. In the moment, it often means calmly taking the misbehaving child aside and trying to identify and understand the source of their behaviour before addressing it directly.
“The challenge is to change your lens,” Lapointe says. “If you can look at your children who are misbehaving as children who are struggling, (you) have to respond to them flavoured by that notion — rather than looking at them as awful and challenging and difficult and failing.”
This overemphasis on addressing behaviours can have detrimental effects on a child’s development. We must nurture healthy emotional relationships, she says. We need to acknowledge our kids’ hunger for strong connections with their parents and be more closely attuned to their emotional needs, particularly when such behaviours arise.
The flip side of this is many of our attempts to force kids to behave involve ‘tricking’ them into falling into line — and these tricks typically work by exploiting their sense of connection and emotional security.
“When children are punished — using timeouts, consequences, or even reward charts — at the core of all of those things is a separation from us,” Lapointe explains.
In other words, we’re telling them, “I know you, I know everything you love — and now I’m going to take one of those things away from you just to teach you a lesson.”
Over time, this brand of reward-punishment discipline takes a psychological toll. Eventually, Lapointe argues, mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, as well as a diminished ability to handle stress, are more common among children raised with this approach.
“Imagine you have your child who misbehaves 27 times a day. … Their brains get all fired up and dysregulated, and you respond to them with disconnection — which then dysregulates the brain more. Yes, they may behave, but they’re only doing it to win you back. You have not settled their brain back down.”
At this point, parents might be asking a few questions: would Lapointe’s approach still ensure kids are well-disciplined and not just running amok?
“If you’re permissively parenting, what that says to me is that you have no boundaries, no structures, no guidelines, no rules — which is not good for kids,” Lapointe says.
In other words, parents must consider what the misbehaving child needs and why they are acting out as a result. This demands greater patience. But ultimately, it’s about raising children to be well-adjusted.