Is There a Time for Harsh Parenting?

Response to Von’s Upside Down Parenting; Letter Exchange

Von, as always, has a well-written, well-thought out, beautifully illustrated response with a reading list attached. I will attempt to address a few key points, but not to match his in-depth piece.

Upside Down Discipline

Harsh Parenting in a Harsh World

Von addresses a distinction I make between the harsh parenting of yesteryear vs. the harsh parenting of today.

She isn’t saying that ‘parenting should be gentle’ but ‘parenting should be gentle when we live in a cushy world, and it should be harsh when the world is harsh.”

To clarify, I do not posit that harsh parenting is useful in a harsh world; I posit that harsh parenting is understandable in a harsh world. Parents who grew up in awful circumstances can be understood when they use harsh methods on their children. Children raised with hunger and frequent injury may have been able to tolerate less gentle parenting also. Harshness in parenting does not prepare a child for a harsh world; harshness in parenting emerges from a harsh world. In my view, no child misses out if they don’t experience harshness. Awful, trying circumstances are best survived  by those who were parented with gentleness and warmth. We can hold space for the generations that came before us, and push ourselves harder, without denigrating the methods of our progenitors.

Teaching Right and Wrong Without Harshness

What happens when consequences don’t match the seriousness of the action? In most cases what happens, especially over time, is that there is a lack of understanding of the seriousness of the action.

How can a child appreciate the full consequences of negative actions without harsh feedback?

I believe that we are all born with an inner conscience, an enormous capacity for shame, guilt, and fear. A soft reprimand is enough to make a vulnerable child feel truly awful. The reprimand does not create its own sting; it reinforces the inner sense of right and wrong we were born with. Harsh punishments might even lead a child to “outsource” his morality. If he is caught, he will pay the price. Avoiding punishment can become the goal instead of honest introspection. Harsh consequences are intended, as I understand it, to reinforce a natural sense of right and wrong, not to instill it. But harsh methods can overpower a child’s delicate balance of goodness and guilt, creating the opposite effect of the one we seek.

Our moral compass is established by watching and copying our parents in word and deed. We learn by overt lessons, but mostly by imitating the behavior we observe, and by natural reactions to our surroundings: a child surrounded by books learns to turn pages; a child who grows I’m up watching their mother cook knows what a kitchen is.

A deep dive into gentle parenting shows that the methods are most effective dealing with the children whose behavior is most challenging.

The Nurtured Heart Approach^® (NHA) is a therapeutic method developed by Howard Glasser in 1992 to help children and adults with challenging behaviors. It is behavior inspiration, not management. Repeated experiences of being seen and acknowledged when things are not going wrong inspires people to build a positive portfolio of themselves: an expansive and expanding reserve of what NHA calls Inner Wealth™

On a practical level, “easy” or “well-behaved” children are not the children who motivate a parent to experiment with parenting strategies that feel unfamiliar and require intense self-discipline. Radically different methods, like gentle parenting, are searched for when traditional methods have failed.

Gentle parenting is not crafted with the gentle child in mind; it’s crafted with the explosive child who doesn’t respond to traditional discipline methods in mind.

Drill Sergeant

Von brings the example of a drill sergeant to illustrate the utility of rigid discipline.

The role of a drill instructor is to take soft, coddled infants and turn them into fighting men.

Maybe a circumstance, like an army, that has a non-random selection of young adult men only, is fertile ground for harsh consequences. I don’t know. I don’t claim to.  But the best preparation for life, even a harsh life, is a soft mother with an unwavering sense of right and wrong.

If G-d intended children to be raised with harshness, men would give birth; not the pinnacle of compassion—mothers.

Guidance of children, and teaching right and wrong is essential. Strong convictions and timeless values are not exclusive to punitive parenting methods. We can take the confidence and the certainty of a morality born of thousands of years of human history and transmit it with love and warmth. Consistent, intuitive, reality-based values are too rare today. We might allow them to be best appreciated by sharing them with love.