Re: So my hometown made it into Yahoo News...
The whole point of the analogy is that punishment, on average, doesn't work. It's not the best method for changing behavior. You *can* fix a TV by hitting it, but if it actually works, you probably just got lucky. Most of the time you're just beating up your TV with no net benefit and causing residual damage.
There are plenty of kids who have "free reign" and aren't shitheads. One doesn't necessarily cause the other and this is committing the fallacy known as "confirmation bias." You're only paying attention to one subset of scenarios and ignoring the ones that contradict your hypothesis.
The idea is that you teach your kid the right ropes so that vandalizing someone else's house doesn't even come up to begin with (if a kid is doing this, it probably wasn't taught properly for a long time prior to that event). Even so, it isn't the case that punishment is *never* justified. There are times when it's totally fine to punish your kid for doing something stupid. But the punishment has to be logical and consistent, and it must fit the crime. If you're just hitting your kids for "being noisy" or publicly shaming them for "being entitled" or whatever, you're not doing it right.
The biggest drawback of punishment is that it only tries to tell you what not to do instead of what you should be doing (reinforcement). Punishment works best when it's immediately coupled with the undesired stimulus and consistently applied (which is why it doesn't work when someone learns to sneak around it or if the punishment is so far removed from the incident. Examples: Jailtime, speeding tickets, etc). It also results in psychological damage/antisocial behavior/delinquency/aggression/etc.
If rebellion is the concern, punishment generates more rebellion and defiance than the alternatives.
Not at all. Again, confirmation bias. Many well-adjusted adults weren't punished as kids like this, nor were they "self-entitled" or spoiled. You can learn to deal with conflict assertively instead of "responding to threats" in the context you're laying out.
The whole point of the analogy is that punishment, on average, doesn't work. It's not the best method for changing behavior. You *can* fix a TV by hitting it, but if it actually works, you probably just got lucky. Most of the time you're just beating up your TV with no net benefit and causing residual damage.
There are plenty of kids who have "free reign" and aren't shitheads. One doesn't necessarily cause the other and this is committing the fallacy known as "confirmation bias." You're only paying attention to one subset of scenarios and ignoring the ones that contradict your hypothesis.
The idea is that you teach your kid the right ropes so that vandalizing someone else's house doesn't even come up to begin with (if a kid is doing this, it probably wasn't taught properly for a long time prior to that event). Even so, it isn't the case that punishment is *never* justified. There are times when it's totally fine to punish your kid for doing something stupid. But the punishment has to be logical and consistent, and it must fit the crime. If you're just hitting your kids for "being noisy" or publicly shaming them for "being entitled" or whatever, you're not doing it right.
The biggest drawback of punishment is that it only tries to tell you what not to do instead of what you should be doing (reinforcement). Punishment works best when it's immediately coupled with the undesired stimulus and consistently applied (which is why it doesn't work when someone learns to sneak around it or if the punishment is so far removed from the incident. Examples: Jailtime, speeding tickets, etc). It also results in psychological damage/antisocial behavior/delinquency/aggression/etc.
If rebellion is the concern, punishment generates more rebellion and defiance than the alternatives.
Not at all. Again, confirmation bias. Many well-adjusted adults weren't punished as kids like this, nor were they "self-entitled" or spoiled. You can learn to deal with conflict assertively instead of "responding to threats" in the context you're laying out.
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