Proper Family Should Revolve Around Parents

Q. For a generation or more, as you so often point out in (this) column, the discipline of children has deteriorated. Do you think the pendulum is finally swinging in the right direction?

A. If by “in the right direction,” you mean in the direction of parents’ expending greater effort where the discipline of children is concerned, then my answer is no, because that is not the right direction.

Today’s parents are rightly being told their children are, in general, an undisciplined lot. The brat, once a rarity, has become ubiquitous. Parents are being led to believe, however, that whatever discipline problems they have with their children can be solved if they use better disciplinary techniques more consistently.

But practicing better disciplinary techniques, however consistently, is not the solution. The solution is for parents to take children out of the center of attention in families and assume that station themselves.

The facts:

A child who has been taught to pay attention to his parents can be disciplined relatively easily.

A child who has not been taught to pay attention to his parents - who is at the center of attention in his family - cannot be disciplined, but only temporarily put in check.

It’s this simple: Parents cannot teach - which is the crux of discipline - a child who is not paying attention, and a child will not pay sufficient attention to parents who act as if it’s their job to pay as much attention to and do as much for the child as possible.

Yes, infants and toddlers must, of necessity, be the focus of their parents’ attention. But it is also in a child’s best interest that the tables be turned, that things must be set right by the time the child is age 3.

Unfortunately, today’s parents believe (because “experts” have told them) they are good parents to the degree that they pay attention to and do things for their children. Because today’s parents, in general, pay excessive attention to their children, their children do not pay sufficient attention to them. And so, children are unsurprisingly undisciplined, and their parents are unsurprisingly exasperated and ready to set things right.

But the notion that firmness or consistency or time-out or spankings will set things right will only set things more wrong. Again, a child who is at the center of attention in his family cannot be disciplined. To give parents more effective disciplinary tools without telling them these tools cannot be effectively used as long as their families are child-centered will inevitably lead to parents becoming frustrated. They will use the tools, but the tools won’t work.

And what will happen then? Either:

Their frustration will drive them to use the tools more rigidly and more aggressively. Time-out won’t work, so they’ll spank, occasionally at first; but an occasional spanking won’t work either, so they’ll spank harder; but harder spankings won’t work, so they’ll spank harder and more frequently.

Other parents, pacifists by nature, will simply give up long before the first spanking is administered.

In either case, children will remain undisciplined.

In the first case, undisciplined children will have to endure unnecessarily harsh attempts at discipline, and government social workers will have field days. In the second case, undisciplined children will become ever-more convinced that adults are wimps, undeserving of respect, and law enforcement budgets will grow by leaps and bounds.

The solution to the problem of under-disciplined children is elementary: It is to once again begin making it perfectly clear to children that adults are the teachers and they are the students.

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