Quote:
Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
I was with him until he said "fear." Fear is an important part of disciplining a child. When one of my kids makes a mad dash for a busy street, it's my job artificially to create the sense of imminent danger in terms em can understand, because traffic is hard to understand, but Daddy suddenly yelling isn't.
The other day one of the little Grinches dropped a penny into the cigarette lighter in the back seat of our car. (Why they put one there in a family vehicle, I'll never understand. I guess the spoiled kids need somewhere to plug in the Nintendo.) The resulting spark was pretty spectacular, but I don't think the kid thought anything more than "hey, cool." If I'm not there to scare the bejeezus out of him, he'd never know how close he got to getting hurt.
As TM knows, a child can fear a certain tone of a parent's voice without fearing the parent. Walking that line to create a proper sense of danger is just plain good parenting.
I say no to hot saucing. It's a waste of good hot sauce.
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Just wait until they get older.
The voice no longer does the trick once they get old enough to note that there is no connection between the voice and any real consequences.
I don't do the hot sauce for the reasons already noted; the last thing anybody needs is some kind of connection between food and punishment (or reward). You can't hit them because all they learn is to hit. The end result is that your arsenal is pretty much empty except for grounding or no tv/nintendo/whatever. But that just leaves the little bastards around getting on your nerves.
Sometimes I think I might get better results if I give the kid the xanax and send myself to my room.
