Call it the discipline wars.
On one side stand no-nonsense parents, as firm as Patton, refusing to excuse misbehavior as child’s play, and meting out — guilt-free! — punishment from an arsenal that includes grounding, curtailment of privileges, additional chores, even a good spanking.
The traditionalists, as they like to call themselves, rail against parents such a Karen Gatewood of Bucks County, Pa., who has twin 3-year-old girls.
Gatewood, 30, once spanked and called “time out.” Now she talks about her children’s feelings. When the girls act up, she sweetly and calmly suggests alternative activities and offers support (“I know you’re sad”) in the midst of tantrums, a touchy-feely technique called “time-in.”
To the traditionalists, this is all baloney.
They make up a growing chorus contending that American parents, in the name of nurturing self-esteem, are so permissive that they’re rearing out-of-control, self-centered brats.
“It’s wimp parenting,” says columnist John Rosemond, guru of the moment to the traditional camp, what with his proclamations on toilet training (by age 2), TV (eliminate it 100 percent), and misbehavior (punish even slight infractions).
Lately, the battle of words is sounding particularly shrill: “We’re punishment junkies,” says Jordan Riak, the executive director of Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education but better known as the guy who recently proposed that Oakland, Calif., become a No-Spanking Zone.
Even though the Oakland City Council defeated the No-Spanking Zone by one vote in January, Riak says he plans to reintroduce the idea there and take his message nationwide. In Europe, he notes, several countries, including Sweden, Norway and Finland, have outlawed corporal punishment (read: spanking) of children.
“A responsible, competent parent promotes a relationship built on trust and nurturing, and not on violence and punishment,” Riak says.
For the record, he also opposes time-outs, grounding and taking away privileges — anything that hints of coercion.
The alternative?
“The adult has to look at himself or herself as the source of the problem,” Riak says. “What are the adults doing that’s wrong? What’s making the kid act that way?”
Such talk has cast a sharp spotlight on the way we discipline our children. Or not.
“Woe be to the parent who tries to control the behavior of children,” says Rosemond, the so-called anti-Spock.
Whatever one’s parenting politics, this much is clear: We’re an insecure lot, and we’re hungry for answers.
Television dramas tackle the issue (Tony Soprano, the lead character on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” once bemoaned the fact that society had made it unacceptable to smack his wayward son). Ten million books on child care and family life are sold each year. Workshops abound. Rosemond travels the country, preaching his style of parenting, a back-to-the-’50s style heavy on punishment.
Talk about conflicting advice. It’s enough to make a parent yell, “Time out!”
Except the clock is running out on time-out. That staple of discipline, in which a child must sit alone in a chair, came into vogue in the early 1990s, following a drop in the popularity of spanking.
The buzzword now is time-in, a process of reasoning with a misbehaving child.
“Time-in helps children build stronger connections with parents ” says Jean Illsley Clarke, the author of the new advice paperback “Time-In: When Time-Out Doesn’t Work” (Parenting Press Inc., $9.95). “The child feels like the parent is there to guide. `No matter what I do, the parent’s on my team.’ “
She and other parenting experts contend that time-out only brands a child as bad and ostracizes him from the group, even if only for a few minutes.
But not everyone agrees.
“That’s horse manure — and that’s my most polite term,” says Rosemond, who sees no harm to self-esteem from timeout. In fact, he views it as a much too lenient — and ineffective — form of discipline.
Parents “must begin to discipline” by age 3, he writes in one column. “Unfortunately, today’s well-intentioned parents . . . give and give and give some more, but expect next to nothing in return.”
But how to discipline? That’s the sticky part.
“I don’t spank,” says Joeyann Mallon, 25, of Bensalem, Pa., mother of Haley, 5 months, and Trevor, 2 1/2. “I was spanked as a kid. You get more rebellious.”
She uses time-out with Trevor. Experts recommend a minute per year of age, though Mallon has made her son sit up to 15 minutes “if he has been real fresh. . . . I think it’s a learning experience.”
Cynthia Lucas, 36, mother of 2 1/2-year-old Christina, says efforts to ban spanking are ridiculous. “I was spanked when growing up. I think I turned out fine. I may slap her (hand) occasionally if she’s doing something dangerous.” She says she also uses time-out, but only for a minute.
Gatewood, a medical technologist who is now a stay-at-home mother, has chosen yet another path.
She changed ways after a hair-pulling day, when the girls, 18 months old then, defied over and over her entreaties to stay clear of a particular bookshelf. She finally spanked one child. It was only a pat but she says she felt bad about it.
So Gatewood turned to the Internet parenting resource http://www.parentsplace.com/ for help. She read that the girls were too young to control their impulses, that spanking, or anything else short of removing the bookshelf, would make no difference. She discovered the gospel of what is billed as “positive parenting.”
Since then, Gatewood has assumed the role of what is known as “teacher advocate,” offering support even in the heat of tantrums. “I’m respectful to them,” she says one afternoon as Amanda and Rebecca play the back yard. “They know I’m for them.”
Gatewood also allows what positive-parenting advocates call “natural and logic consequences” of behavior to flow.
For example, Amanda recently wanted to take a favorite piece of string on an outing. Gatewood warned that she might lose it, but Gatewood didn’t argue with the child. She allowed the natural and logical consequences to unfold.
Sure enough, Amanda lost the string and sobbed.
Gatewood didn’t ignore Amanda’s feelings, as pediatricians suggest in the face of a tantrum. “I said, `That is sad. It’s horrible,’ because to her, it was horrible. She said, `I won’t bring my toys next time.’ “
It was discipline, Gatewood insists, but it was delivered without a spank or a timeout.
To Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist and father of two girls, “discipline is structure, an order to things and limits. Yes, you can do that. No, you can’t do that.”
He sounds as if he is a much more rigid parent than Gatewood. He isn’t.
Farley, a Baby Boomer who won’t give his age, says yes to a lot in his household — behavior that might make another parent furious.
Take the scribble, on the off-white walls of the family room.
“I have said, `Don’t draw on the walls,’ ” says Farley, who spends a significant part of the day with his daughters, Frankee, 4, and Annee, 3.
But he has never punished the girls for scribbling.
“I can paint it,” he says. “Kids pass through certain phases of behavior. Don’t be harsh on kids,” says Farley, a psychologist.
Farley says he uses “flexible discipline,” and he believes it is the only way with a certain type of child — what he calls Type T, for thrill-seekers.
Type T children take risks and break rules. “You’ve got to realize you can’t stamp out of them their risk-taking,” Farley says. “The best you can do is guide them . . . offer options.”
But Farley is a realist too. ” `Let us reason together’ doesn’t always work,” he says.
“Find your own way,” Farley says. “There’s no one best way.”
In other words, buy a book. Take a workshop. Discipline in America is a parent’s choice — at least for now.
