Your six-year-old insists that he wants to play soccer in your living room, with the latent possibility of destroying vases and windows; then you stand up, and with a face as serious as your facial muscles allow, you threaten to punish him.

The next day, your little sprout of the underworld refuses to do his homework, and you again threaten to punish him . Later on, he seems to be determined to bother his little sister, and you, what a novelty, threaten to punish him.

All of these cases, of course, are fictional, but they represent well the discipline methodology that many parents use. But, are the punishments really effective? The answer depends on what you intend to achieve with your child.

Does punishment work?

If you are looking for an immediate response to an order , the strategy will most likely be successful. But in that case, your child will be agreeing to what you ask for out of fear, out of fear of punishment; not because he respects you as a parent or because he believes that proceeding in that way is the right thing to do.

Implicitly, you will be teaching the child that problems are solved through the threat or exercise of power . And that the best way to get people to do things is to put fear under their skin.

The Jonathan Freedman Experiment

An astute psychologist named Jonathan Freedman conducted an interesting experiment that illustrates the above point.He went to a school where he took a group of children and took them, one by one, to a special room where there were several cheap toys and bawls, among which was a fantastic robot full of lights and gadgets that were operated by remote control. In this context, told the child that he had to leave the room for a few minutes , and that in the meantime, he could play with any of the toys, except the robot.

“If you ever touch the robot, then I’ll find out and I’ll be very, very angry,” he said with his best ogre face. Then he would leave the room and watch what the boy was doing through a mirrored glass. Obviously, almost all the children who went through the experiment made an effort to control their impulses and avoided getting close to the robot.

In the second condition of the same experiment, Freedman simply told the children, that while he was away for a few moments, they could entertain themselves by playing, but that “it was not right for them to play with the robot”. In this case, he did not resort to threats of any kind, he simply assured them that it was not right to touch the robot.On this occasion, as in the previous one, practically all the children avoided approaching the robot, and they were satisfied with the other unattractive toys .

The effect of the absence of authority

But what’s interesting is what happened a little over a month later. Freedman sent a collaborator to the same school to repeat the same sequence with the same children, both from one group and the other. Only this time, when the woman had to leave the room, she didn’t say anything to the children. In other words, they were free to do whatever they wanted.

What happened turned out to be absolutely amazing and revealing.The children in the first group, who a month earlier had avoided playing with the robot by following an external order issued by a frowning adult, with no adult present and the threat having therefore disappeared, felt free to play with the forbidden toy.

In contrast, the boys in the second group, even though Freadman was not present, did exactly the same as the previous time, and stayed away from the flashy robot. In the absence of an external threat, first of all, it seemed that they had developed their own, internal, arguments justifying why they should not play with the robot.

Thus, perhaps convinced that it was their decision, and not the arbitrary imposition of someone else , they felt inclined to act in a way consistent with their beliefs.These children, seeing themselves free from external pressures, assumed responsibility for their own actions, probably feeling that they were the ones who voluntarily chose what they wanted to do.

The importance of motivation

The moral is clear: both the punishments and the rewards are external motivations that do not generate a long-term commitment, with the desired behavior fading away as soon as the desired consequence disappears.

In everyday life, I have often been able to observe with my own eyes how some parents, worse still, punish their children by forcing them to do their homework or read a book , creating the false notion that these activities are in themselves bad, unpleasant and worth avoiding. In return, they reward them with more hours of television and video games, reinforcing the idea that these activities are desirable and have great rewarding power.

Yes, dear readers. It is common in these times for our children to grow up believing that reading is contemptible and should be avoided at all costs, and watching television is the path to personal pleasure and success.If you are the parent of a young child, or plan to be one soon, I urge you to do things right: educate your child on a minimum set of moral standards if you want him to eventually become a good adult. That is all that is needed. Don’t teach him to obey just for fear of punishment .

At some point, if you’re lucky, you’ll grow old. Don’t complain if your historically bullied son has now become a spiteful adult and you decide to put him in a crummy nursing home or send him on vacation to Ethiopia in the middle of summer.