Imogen

If the child takes off his seat belt, stop the vehicle and don't drive it again until everyone is safely buckled and the situation is satisfactory to the driver. The same goes for screaming, throwing objects, kicking the driver's seat and spitting. It isn't very complicated.

Would you drive with an unbuckled adult in your vehicle? What if he was screaming at you? What if in the car ahead, you saw an unbuckled adult screaming at the driver, or the driver turned toward the back, screaming at the passengers? Would you continue to drive at such close proximity?

When I'm in a vehicle, I expect everyone to be buckled and not screaming. If I'm driving, I stop whenever something or someone causes my situation to be unsafe. I have stopped for each of my children a few times, once for each sort of infraction they chose (because yes, mummie stops for screaming and kicking the back of her seat). I have stopped more than once for my partner when he wasn't buckled: his body flying around in the van would likely kill any one of the rest of us in a collision. We have stopped the vehicle several times for each child at around the 18 month and 2 1/2 yr stages. Then, we don't need to do so anymore. In my experience, a five, six, or seven year old who causes unsafe conditions in a moving vehicle has either not been adequately instructed or has issues beyond the scope of healthy impulse management. I have had no issues at all with my children beyond that 2 1/2 yr mark, in the vehicle.

I stop for crying babies, too, because I am emotionally distraught by their continued crying. I meet their needs, and we move on.

Of course this happens within the context of a family in which each individual truly values his time for the sake of productivity, and even our two yr old has chastised a sibling for taking his time from him through misbehaviour in the vehicle. My children have a healthy appreciation for the reality that time wasted is not regained, that time spent waiting for unsafe behaviour is time they cannot spend drawing dragons and building cities with blocks, or practicing sword-fighting.

If children do not value their time, then it stands to reason that they will not care that they are wasting it.

My solution to all of the problems in this thread is to deliberately lay a foundation of reasoned values and then live accordingly, virtuously. Children are eager to learn. Hitting them or taking away so-called privileges only regresses the issue, and shows up the holes in one's parenting (barring very unusual circumstances and of course accounting for genuinely new circumstances to the child).

Parenting is enormously inefficient and inconvenient. The best-case-scenario is usually to take the time necessary to provide foundational information and conclusions for children to use in their own re-invention of the wheel. If you don't have the time or inclination to do this, you will find yourself having to teach lessons that could have been more easily learned and internalised when they first emerged as issues, rather then later on when an uneducated child can do more damage to himself and/or others.

It is also imperative that a parent's expectations accord with the abilities of the child. Discipline is about guidance, not punishment. A child who does not have the ability to take responsibility for his own actions fully, should not be punished, even when behaving in a way that draws attention to his inability to take full responsibility (like pulling off a seatbelt), but the parent who neglected to guide the child in the first place- foundationally- should be (or better yet: take the cue!).

Parenting should be proactive, not reactive. Some people object to the obvious intensity of engagement that this would require. Well, this is why most people shouldn't have children until or unless this undertaking is within their scope of abilities. Parenting isn't automatic.

I filled in at a daycare once, for a friend, and was completely shocked at how unengaged the children were. I spent the day with ten children from 18 months to 5 yrs old in my charge and it was like a vacation. At the time, I had four children, and it would have taken two weeks for that group of ten children to receive what my four do in a day, at the rate of the program and the rate of inquiry of those cow-eyed children. Imagine my stunned silence when the other workers (who between the three of them, handled only five children)commented at how talkative and curious the children were with me. Then they asked how much harder it was for me to care for so many kids. I couldn't help but blurt out that it was like a vacation for me. Then my friend asked if I would stay on, and bring my children, too. I think I lost my usual composure and exclaimed with a bit too much emphasis, "No, thanks."

If you send your child to daycare or school, trying to do this will be a bit like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up a hill. Schooling enforces enormous wasting of one's time and lack of productivity, so trying to explain that doing the wrong/inappropriate thing uses up time that a child could be spending doing something enjoyable and productive, is likely to fall on deaf, or anti-productivity-conditioned ears. In this case, the child is likely to think, "But who cares? I'll just do it tomorrow." This is how school works: the continuous rolling over into tomorrow what could/should/would have been accomplished today, followed by repetition to bring back to mind what was forgotten because it was neglected in the first place.

Violence, even mild violence is not an objective method for dealing with children. What youre teaching them is that some activities are intrinsically wrong, and must be punished. Its no different than "teaching" a child that he cant eat pork because the "sacred tablets" say not to. Objectivity is the volitional adherence to logic, not refraining from activities for fear of painfull repercussions.

Just to be clear in case my wording didn't get across correctly what I meant the first time, I was not suggesting that you should consider creating a less than desirable environment for your kid. If you meant that I should know you wouldn't be doing what you were doing if you thought it was less than desirable, that's kind of beside the point because what I was trying to bring up was to ask if maybe you simply haven't considered some things before to realize that perhaps their may be something lacking in your approach. Furthermore, I do not believe everything about the way you are raising this kid must be bad or even that the sum total is not generally good. I'm asking about a pretty specific aspect here which has been used in a limited enough amount and way that, if you can assume for the sake of a hypothetical for a moment, the bad effects of which could be overall drowned out by other positives in what you have been doing so that you may not realize what damage has been done or what further potential for good has been missed out on. So in sum total, I'm saying just because you turned out well and your kid has been pretty good, doesn't mean the physical punishment usage and threat of usage is helping bring about any positive outcomes, or at least not the best possible outcomes compared to other options, in either of you.

Now, why should you consider methods of raising children that exclude the use and threat of use of physical punishment in general, even if very limited and light physical punishment only? First off, aside from bringing up correlation with your own upbringing and that you turned out well, a correlation which does not establish a causation among other things, you also bring up a correlation to having seen children raised by parents who refused to use physical punishments and threats of such and some negative results in how those kids turned out in your observation and experience. This too only is a correlation though and not an established causation. Why should you question the connection being a causal one here? From what I've seen at least and I suspect you may have noticed this too, by far and large, the same families who refuse to use physical punishments have more than just that one element in common. These families often have a more lax attitude toward parenting and what the role and purpose of a parent is in a child's life. Think of the kinds of parents who may want too much to be like the child's friend rather than any sort of authority figure in general to them. The kinds of parents are low on setting guidelines and making any kind of refusals to their children at all often. They may have a very short-range and kind of hedonistic approach to the child perhaps, just aiming to give the child whatever they happen to want at the moment with few questions asked and let the child do whatever the child wants whenever with little hesitance. In general, they give in, they fail to guide, they let the kid run wild with little to no directions on where to go or why to go there. This, however, is not the kind of approach anybody here is advocating anybody takes with raising children. What is advocated is not being "soft" and constantly caving in and letting kids get away with whatever. What IS advocated is firm guidance and clear limits and consequences, just with physical punishments being dealt out by the parents not being one of those consequences. There is a very different reasoning for this one same position held between these two separate parties where the differences are more important than the similarities. It's kind of like how both Objectivists and communists may advocate for atheism, but they have very different reasons and very little else in common and very different results in spite of how they have atheism in common.

So what is the different reasoning behind why a number of people here do not advocate the usage or threat of consequences for wrongdoing taking the form of parents inflicting any kind of physical pains? Quite frankly, "the consequences of lying include getting hit by a parent" just does not make sense. It is a very arbitrary form of punishment not stemming from anything about how reality works. The two main goals here are teaching and protecting kids basically, right? Hitting the child contributes to neither of those things. It doesn't tell them anything about the inevitable logical results of being a liar, only the potentially avoidable consequences you are copying based on tradition and association. This doesn't let them know why it benefits them not to lie, just why it benefits them not to get caught lying by you, much like just because a bully may have been in a kid's life at one point and threatened to hit them if they didn't give them their lunch money, it doesn't mean it is in one's best interests to give lunch money to anybody who asks for it as a general policy in the future, even when those people do not threaten to attack them if the child refuses to give the money up.

So, supposing you assume that the hitting and threats of such to your child are not about the teaching itself, but about protecting them in some (slightly counter intuitive) way? How about that, you may inquire. Suppose you took the view point perhaps of treating this as supplemental to the actual teaching material, seeing it as protective by trying to use the physical pain as a way to drive in that you really mean it, they better remember to stick to this one. Driving home the point and getting them to remember it you may think is helping protect them, so if it it accomplishes this you may believe it is a good parenting move. Again I would ask why you would use this as your form of driving in your message. There are other ways to make strongly clear to a child why they really are doing themselves no favors by generally being dishonest. One way is to *demonstrate* those consequences in action. Do things to show it, point out examples of the consequences. As has been brought up before, liars are not trustworthy. Show the kid that you now find their actions and claims cannot be trusted because they've shown they're willing to lie to you to try to deceive you. Don't let them do various things because you can't trust claims they make about what they say they'll do, if they will stick to safety measures like they say they will, if they can be trusted not to break some fragile object when they say they will be careful, if they really mean it when they say they intend to take care of that goldfish if you get it for them, et cetera. Think of it this way: there are two teachers teaching science classes. Which one do you think would help drive home an understanding and acceptance of the message in the text book better - the one that does demonstrations to illustrate examples of the truths from the lessons, or the one that just smacks students with a ruler if they forget or get things wrong or don't seem to believe it for lack of clarity? Maybe threatening to inflict physical pain could get a kid to fall in line more quickly than having a long conversation with them about reasons and following through on these kinds of demonstration punishments, but parenting is about the long term interests and as with school learning, quicker is definitely not always better. Trying to cram and quickly memorize text for a test may be quicker, but it is not good in the long term as it misses actually comprehending in favor of memorizing and it is quickly forgotten, never really making it into storage in the long term memory. Parenting is for the long term, you don't want to just get lazy and opt for the quicker method that will get them to do something beneficial for now for reasons they don't know in lieu of the one that actually will get them to stick to it long term because they know why it benefits them even when you aren't around.

If you understand and agree with my reasoning thus far about the efficacy of punishments taking of form of demonstrating why the logical consequences of certain actions are bad for a child, good. Perhaps you may ask why you can't still use punishments and threats of such involving inflicting of physical pain anyway, in addition to those demonstrations which are already being used to drive home the point. I would ask why you would still want to do so though. Why might you think it really needs that even further form of trying to make them remember? Why might you not believe that the approach of giving reasons and demonstrated logical consequences is sufficient? Might the kid still mess up with this method and try to find a way to get around lying not being generally in their best interests anyway and you may find yourself then having to repeat the process with them again with repetition as an additional reinforcement? Quite possibly, even likely, but the same can be said for a method that also employs inflicting physical pain upon discovery of bad deeds. If you have any other arguments for why you may think you could still get some more kind of benefit from keeping inflicting physical pain in there as a regular (even if rarely and lightly used) part of your disciplinary repertoire, the ball is in your court now to please say what that benefit is.

I've grown up in Canada, and previous to visiting Cuba, I had little appreciation for the then seemingly over-the-top-bright, intensely saturated colour palettes seen commonly in art produced by artists who live/work near the equator. While I was in Cuba, the second day there, I walked down to the water on the beach at the resort I was staying at, and was astonished to see a sun-blazing, over-the-top-bright, intensely saturated landscape of natural and manmade objects, and in that moment, I thought immediately of all of the paintings that I just didn't 'get' until I had personally experienced the light of the environment from/within which they were created.

After that, I revisited myriad paintings and began sourcing photographs of the regions they were meant to depict and/or where they were created. My whole visual scope of appreciation was blown wide open, and I wondered how in all the time I'd studied art, there had not been one mention of this, that every professor, teacher and artist I'd encountered had not mentioned or even given full attention to something so important as this.

Being from Canada, the necessity for traveling to really 'see' might be overlooked because the country is so large and most people probably do see much of it, without seeing much of a light change from coast to coast, and if most people don't leave altogether, they might not even know. I used to live in the southern-most part and now live in the far north, not quite as north as possible, but close.

I don't associate cool colours with negative emotion at all; the light here is usually cool. I do associate cool colours with a peaceful or serene feeling though, like the strangely audible silence during the long winter; it's peaceful and rejuvenating, not sad or depressing, or negative at all. We do have bright warm colours too, but they are always in contrast with the coolness of everything else. This is the distinct beauty of the north, I think.

I rely heavily on the content of a painting to convey the intended emotions. Perhaps I have a glitch in my brain that I don't seem to have automatic emotional responses to colours. I do find some colours physiologically irritating on their own and/or in combination, but this doesn't seem to me to be emotional. I can usually enjoy those colours in small doses in the right context.

This is a complex topic.