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| |     With Discipline, Stick to Your Convictions by Dr. Benjamin Spock reviewed and revised by Robert Needlman, M.D., F.A.A.P. I think that good parents who naturally lean toward strictness should raise their children that way. Moderate strictness--in the sense of requiring good manners, prompt obedience, orderliness--is not harmful to children. Strictness is fine so long as the parents are basically kind and so long as the children are growing up happy and friendly. But strictness is harmful when parents are overbearing, harsh, and chronically disapproving or when they make no allowances for a child's age and individuality. This kind of severity produces children who are either meek and colorless or mean-spirited. Parents who have an easygoing style of management can also raise children who are considerate and cooperative. Such parents may be satisfied with casual manners as long as the child's attitude is friendly; and they may happen not to be particularly strict--for instance, about promptness or neatness. The key is, they are not afraid to be firm about those matters that do seem important to them. Permissiveness: angry parents, unhappy kids When parents get unhappy results from too much permissiveness, it is not so much because they demand too little, though this is part of it. It is more because they are timid or guilty about what they ask or because they are unconsciously encouraging the child to rule the roost. If parents are too hesitant in asking for reasonable behavior--because they have misunderstood theories of self-expression, because they are self-sacrificing by nature, or because they are afraid of making their children dislike them--they can't help resenting the bad behavior that comes instead. They keep getting angry underneath without really knowing what to do about it. This bothers their children too. It is apt to make them feel guilty and scared, but it also makes them meaner and all the more demanding. If, for example, babies acquire a taste for staying up in the evening and the parents are afraid to deny them this pleasure, they may turn into disagreeable tyrants who keep their mothers and fathers awake for hours. Parents are bound to dislike them for their tyranny. If parents can learn to be firm and consistent in their expectations, it's amazing how fast the children will sweeten up and the parents will, too. In other words, parents can't feel right toward their children in the long run unless they can make them behave reasonably, and children can't be happy unless they are behaving reasonably. Click here to join the discussion on Discipline
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