Embarrassing Discipline?

Discipline detrimental to my child in the long run, or is it

A question of whether to discipline a child publicly or not has been mentioned recently and it won’t leave my thoughts. So I have done some serious thinking and came to some conclusions of my own.

When it comes to discipling my son he gets a spank on the bottom, a smack on the hand and an occasional “pop” on the mouth. It happened to me as a child and I turned out just fine. In my eyes discipline worked for me and it will work for my son.

Some parents today don’t believe in discipline. It isn’t appropriate to hit a child anymore. Now it is even considered abuse. This just puzzles me. Is wasn’t abuse when it happened to us, but now it is. Hmm…? I am not making the connection.

There was this incident where I witnessed a child contorting another child in a manner that wasn’t friendly and frankly wasn’t playful. The child that was in what seemed excruciating pain wasn’t having any fun was screaming and crying. No other parents were running to her aide, so I ran up and stopped the older girl and immediately rushed her to her mother for discipline.

Here is where it gets weird. I didn’t do the discipling. I simply stopped the bad behavior and brought the child to the mother to handle her child. Since this happened at an event that had close to 100 guests apparently the mother was embarrassed that I pulled her daughter aside and brought her to her for discipline. Wait a minute. what?!

This just irritated me. Her daughter just bent another child in half, made her scream in agonizing pain and you’re embarrassed because I brought her to you to discipline? You should really be embarrassed that she just seriously hurt some little girl.

If my son had done anything remotely close to what her daughter had done, oh my gosh he would be in so much trouble. I wouldn’t care what people thought, said or even saw. There is no reason for a child to act like that in public or with another child.

Secondly, publicly disciplining your child teaches them that they cannot and will not get away with anything. If all you do is wait until you get home to discipline they will not learn anything.

So okay I get it, you don’t want to physically hit your child. But how about you actually deal with your child in that moment and teach them a valuable lesson. Don’t allow them to act that way in public. Otherwise they will continue to act up and remember that they can do whatever they want when in public and get away with it without punishment.

I am not asking everyone to start beating their children, just start realizing that generations before were disciplined and actually survived. They actually had better manners and respected adults. Parents be considerate of other parents, don’t judge them for disciplining their children and thank them when they help discipline your children, even thank them. You never know what they may have just done for you later on down the road.

Blog by Melissa Chandler