OK - all you non smackers - what would you do instead then?

[lisalisa]

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Oh, Franny! you are awake!

Am on Amazon at the mo - which Alfie Kohn should I get first, "Punished By Rewards", or "Unconditional Parenting"?

Jahn - I beg to differ - the smack clearly doesn't work as she continued to have temper tantrums!

I agree though that LL sounds completely done in! But smacking really isn;t the answer. Sometimes children find it hard to find a way out of a temper tantrum and I think you need to do all that you can to spot when they are really ready to give up on it! As some have already said the swimsuit point seems to have been the point where she wanted you to help her - to rescue her from herself!

The problem is I think - that when we are all frazzled and done in - out temper tantrums are as bad as their's and we're bigger and can hit harder. It doesn;t make for a pleasant environment.

I know you've said that DH is working hard to work off your debts - but do try and see if there is any chirpie cheap cheap help going. Perhaps a nanny in training from a local college or something like that?

But please, don;t all kid yourselves that smacking worked - it got you out of the short term problem, but bringing up happy children and having a good, life long relationship with them is a whole different ball game!

well said that box

Erm, you always do it better than me, aviatrix, but I think most of us feel punishments are not pleasant or desirable, whereas rewards are just the other side of the same coin. Rewards, apart from being manipulative and unethical, decrease intrinsic motivation so that the child actually comes to dislike the activity they are being rewarded for doing.

Greeny, buy them both, then order me some copies for my birthday Mine are at the library.

(just think, if I had my own I could do quotes and all sorts. don't you think MN should have a whip round?)

p.s. must admit to using huge bribe today

did actually work which was a first

however I feel grubby now

Just curious to know how you do the no punishment/no reward thing with your children, that's all, and why it's detrimental to a parent & child relationship.

Oliveoil - you made me laugh out loud with this

Takes a LOT of effort though when you just want to screech 'of ffs shut the f up you little shit' <

I remember swearing in my head at DS1 when he was giving it laldy with a tantrum!!

Lisalisa - you have my sympathies, you really do.
What I would have done in your situation was remove her from the others and tell her she would be staying in her room till she stopped her carryon. If she then came out of the room repeatedly I would have smacked her

I am sorry to say that I did smack my children when they ushed the limits. However, it was not a viscious circle that went on and on with them then attacking others, or with me having to hit them harder and harder. Smacking ceased at an age when you could achieve the outcome more readily with another form of punishment.

Even my DS1 who can still rub me up the wrong way (we are very similar) believes he has been well brought up in a loving family.

If I was having children all over again, my approach may have been different from what I have subsequently learnt. However, I may not have ruled out smacking altogether if faced with the type of behavious lisalisa has. I have 4 children 19yrs, 17yrs, 16 yrs and 12 years. They are not traumatised from having been smacked (I, however, harboured grudges against my parents for years because of indescriminate smacking).

I am not trying to be pro smacking. I am just trying to point out that when it is used as a last resort, children need not be emotionally damaged.

Am now hiding under a rock.....

The voice of sweet reason, mears. You put it so much better than me. Thank you

I thought we were on the same wavelength JanH. There's room for you under this rock too

sorry, but no one is 'born stroppy'.

born with headache from traumatic bad birth maybe....born with a propensity to stress from high cortisol levels when in the womb maybe....born stroppy, no way.

no way. it just does not work like that.

I think we are all born with our personalities which develop, otherwise all my children would be the same and they are not. I don't think babies are born stroppy.

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I honestly think that if kids basically feel that you love them it doesn't matter if you smack them. That's on the basis of being smacked every once in a while as an annoying child. I don't think it worked in making me a better person but I really hope it at least made my folks feel better. With my mum, she'd lose it when I was being smug and vile and above myself and irritating and aim a slap at me, whereupon I would become even more hoity toity and horrible and accuse her of being a temper losing, child-beating reprobate. And my poor, poor dad was just no match for us- he had no parenting strategies at all in between total permissiveness and apoplexy, much to our amusement. Quite suddenly he'd have had enough of our truly appalling behaviour to which he'd previously seemed serenely oblivious and we'd have to run from the room at top top speed as RIGHT THAT'S IT I'M GOING TO BEAT YOU TO WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR LIFE rang through the flat. I think I could slap my kids in both ways if pressed so make a conscious effort not to in case I knock them into the middle of next week by mistake. But I can't think that many people hold it against their parents unless said parents are fundamentally unpleasant. Which I am sure is not the case with anyone here.

I am much more shocked at locking in than smacking

My ds1 has huge tantrums that go on for ages and are really hard to deal with when I am already frazzled. So you have my sympathies, lisalisa. What I found really helped both me and dp was

(a) going to some parenting sessions held by a local children's centre - they got us to think about what started the tantrums, what the kids were actually trying to achieve (usually attention, certainly in my ds's case), how much positive attention we gave our kids, and various approaches for dealing with the bad tantrums

(b) help from our HV. She actually came round every fortnight for about 4 or 5 sessions, talking to me about how things were, what had set ds off during this time (i kept a diary), how I dealt with it, what I would change next time, etc.

(c) the same book that Sophable has mentioned. "How to talk so kids can listen and listen so kids can talk". I really really like this book, and again, dp (who hasn't read any parenting books as far as I recall) is a fan of it too.

At the moment my techniques with ds1 are

• to try to praise him for doing stuff that is good, however small it is
• to talk to him at the end of the day about what's happened and how he felt about it
• to stick to my guns, and when he starts to whinge, say 'do you really think that is going to help you get an ice lolly?' or whatever it is
• give clear warning for my 'punishments', or whatever the consequences are for his actions, e.g. ask him to do something by the time I've counted to ten, or else... and following through
• to try to express these ultimatums in positive language, e.g. "if you tidy up those animals by the time I've counted to ten, we will be able to go out to the park" instead of "we're not going to the park unless you tidy up those animals". I don't always manage this!!
• to try not to engage in conversation once he enters the 'tantrum zone', except to tell him that I'll talk to him when he stops. This is the tough one, but it should apply however long it goes on for - even if he cries himself to sleep. My mum couldn't quite believe it when she came to stay once and he did just that. But my reasoning is that he has to learn that the tantrum doesn't get results.
• sometimes I physically move him to another room. As you pointed out, this causes problems if you have to keep moving them back when they are still tantrumming. I'm not sure how helpful this technique has been, to be honest.

I think he is learning, and so am I. The worst 'incidents' are often when I try to engage or reason with him after the tantrum has started, like you did with your dd. But I know I'm not perfect, so at least if I try to learn from those incidents I can get a little better and hopefully we can both be a little happier.

hope that helps a little

Scummy - in part I think you are right - but I can only just about pass off my parents smacking as being 'what people did then'.

I think the difficulty is that with the next generation they are supposed to be being reared by the 'enlightened' and I seriously wonder whether they will be so forgiving of physical punishment.

I need Aloha here - she was always such good back up on these debates

lisalisa, have just noticed (on another thread) that your youngest has severe reflux. That's like my ds2 - and I think leads to some seriously frazzled parents and makes it really hard to deal with normal parenting situations, let alone tantrumming siblings. Do you have any help around? I went to Homestart but obviously didn't plead my case well enough because they didn't send us a volunteer whereas my friend round the corner got one pronto. But that was the main reason why our HV came round - I called the surgery one day at my wits end saying I really needed some help - she ended up concentrating on the tantrums but I think just having an adult listening to me during the day was a huge help in itself.

anyway, just wanted to say I empathise even more now, because I know just what it's like.

I do know what you mean, soapbox. I am not in favour of hitting my children and don't. But I just wonder if we inflate the whole parenting do this not that or damage them terribly for life thing quite a lot these days. I am grateful that my parents and my mum particularly fed us nice food and tried to make sure we were educated and happy emotionally and had a nice time. But I honestly treasure many of my memories of my parents behaving quite badly as parents- fighting with each other, failing to respond effectively to protracted temper tantrums (my mum usually joined in with my sister, ffs), aiming clouts in our direction and then feeling guilty about it, getting pissed and slagging off each others' families. All clearly parenting failures but SO funny and, in the context of emotional warmth, brilliant windows into my parents as PEOPLE. My mum died when I was 17 and I am so so thirsty for memories of her as a person. I like my dad as a person a lot. I hope my boys will find any occasional bad behaviour from me as a parent as funny and heartwarming and annoying and stupid as I found hers and my dad's. I want them to think i was a good parent, of course i do, but i want them to know me as a person in the round as well. And, it's by my mistakes that they'll glimpse that most until they're old enough to get to know me on more equal terms, I suspect. So for lisalisa, I think she needs to think about whether this is a "shit- I lost it today" blip that may add to her dd's conception of her as a "character" or whether it's something rather more difficult that might an indication that things generally need to change between her and her dd.

great post sm

Scummy -you're obviously a much more tolerant old soul than I am!

I hated the uncertainty as to whether my parents were in a good mood or bad, and the consequences it would have on us!

But I've turned out all right - I think

Lisa sounds under a lot of pressure, which is why I tried to be supportive rather than outright anti-smacking. I think with 5 children I would be a gibbering wreck - and probably wouldn't even know which day of the week it was, far less worrying about the odd tantrum or two

Ain't that the truth- 5 children would make me lie back like Kurtz, gulping "the horror, the horror."
I am mostly quite an unstructured, chaotic, laidback person, I think and I liked it when mild mayhem and drama intervened into my life as a child, apart from in the rare situations when it was seriously upsetting and scary (but for me those only came about as the result of bad parenting extremely infrequently and were due more unfortunate life events.) As I say though, this was in the context of things mostly plodding along quite nicely with a mum who was a thoughtful and conscientious parent and a dad who was a bit more hands off and eccentric but very well meaning.

I think you are me, but articulate. You certainly had similar parents!

cool- I like the sound of your parents.

Yup, they were fab. I'm only just beginning to realise that human relationships don't actually need to have neat edges, however.