Good Parenting is Painful

I absolutely love the age my son is at right now (though I have loved all his ages). He’s 3 1/2 and is so much fun to play with. Within the last week, for some reason, I’ve seen a drastic increase in his tendency to hit. This has been a subject we’ve discussed with him ever since he could swing his arm, and it’s not been a problem until now.

Over the weekend, I spent a lot of time with him and when he and I were playing, he would often resort to hitting me, usually several times after I stopped playing and was looking at him. And when he didn’t get it, I would remind him that we don’t hit. Eventually I began asking him what he’d just done - trying to get him to begin seeing it. He would say “hit you” and I’d say, “and do we do that?” “No” was his reply. But 20 minutes later…

By Monday evening, I felt I had talked it up enough that he knew this was an issue and we’d given him opportunities to get it under control himself. So, as we were playing Monday evening, and he hit me, I stopped him and said, “We don’t hit, and although I don’t want to do this, if you hit me again, you will need to sit in timeout.” He said okay.

Ten minutes later, it was clear that it wasn’t incidental. Now, keep in mind that he’s not punching me, and he’s not being angry or upset - this is just a kid playing rough, and that makes it harder. I said, “Buddy, what did I say would happen if you hit again?” He began getting upset. “It was an accident” was his excuse. I said, “I know it was an accident, but it still happened. And you’re having a hard time remembering not to do this, and you need to sit in timeout for one minute to help you remember not to do it in the future.”

As he protested, I felt my resolve giving way a bit, because I really don’t like disciplining my son. But I knew that if we didn’t get on top of this, eventually it would happen at school, and then it would be harder to address. So I said, “It’s only one minute - just a short timeout to help you remember.” He asked if he could do timeout on the couch, and I said that was fine. My wife was in the room too, letting me handle it. He sat up there and in my head I began doing a rough count to 60.

I could see the instant he began feeling really bad about what he’d done. His eyes got watery, and I began to count faster to myself. His lip started quavering, and so did my heart. I was pretty sure it had only been 20 seconds, but it was probably long enough. Then he began to really cry. I held out my arms and he came to me and cried on my shoulder for a few minutes. I told him that I didn’t like putting him in timeout, and that I was sorry that he was upset. I hoped out loud that it would help him remember next time because this was important to us.

A minute later he was back to himself, and we didn’t have any problems with hitting the rest of the evening. I hated doing that because I know he wasn’t being mean - he was just totally engrossed in playing. But it was necessary and as we’ve seen in the past with our son, you usually need to really get his attention once and he begins remembering a lot better what is expected of him.

Sometimes parents avoid disciplining their children because they hate that feeling you get when they’re crying and upset because they got in trouble. But we have to find a way to deal with that and do the right thing. Not addressing it now, regularly, until it’s no longer a problem could lead us to bigger problems later. And as we saw, he wasn’t upset with us or resentful for the discipline - he was sad that he was “in trouble.” And that’s a good thing too, that the child feels bad when they’ve done wrong.

I’ve heard of this going to extremes the other direction too, and I’m certainly not an advocate of not letting kids mess up and figure things out on their own at times. But when discipline is appropriate, sometimes you know what you have to do, and you know it’s going to be painful. But poor parenting is more painful.

One of my favorite quotes on parenting is from Frederick Douglass:

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.