Children may respond well to rewards and punishments – but, in the long run, you are doing them no favours
CHILDREN DO not need rewards and punishments, according to Clare Healy Walls.
They only serve to undermine the child’s natural drive to develop and improve, by moving control from the child to the adult.
This is the most difficult part of parenting by this system to understand, she concedes. “Society could not function without reward and punishment, at least not without punishment.”
But for a child, they interfere with the development of self-discipline and distort the value and satisfaction of completing a task.
“Punishment erodes self-esteem,” she says. “You do learn through humiliation, but at what cost? It chips away at the children’s sense that they are in charge of their own lives.”
There are alternatives to punishment, what she calls limits, which help the child behave in a socially acceptable manner but do not remove the power from the child.
Take a child who is misbehaving: don’t banish them to spend a fixed time on the “naughty step”, or up in their room. Rather, say: “I see you are out of control; why don’t you go out until you calm down and think you are ready to come back.” Don’t make it shameful but empower the child to control his behaviour.
One of the biggest problems is the education system, she says, in a society which measures your personal worth by your performance. It’s easy to make a child think that you care more about his exam results than you do about him.
“If you rear your children to think for themselves,” she adds, “the only pressure will be what they put on themselves.”