Listen to thisProfessional child/youth care workers, teachers, teacher’s aides, mental health workers, recreation leaders, and parents seem to find themselves most taxed, frustrated, and challenged when confronted with unacceptable behaviour that requires intervention and “management”. Behaviour management workshops are among the first to fill up at training conferences. Behaviour management problems are usually the first to be raised by parents in classes and parenting support groups. Direct care providers search for “a bag of tricks” to use in managing the behaviour of children in their charge. And there are many tricks, or “techniques” as we often call them. These techniques are useful and necessary in our work with children and young people, but probably more important are the conceptual framework from which we view behaviour, and the goals for our interventions with disruptive or “inappropriate” behaviours. When we are able to empathically view or understand seemingly troubled behaviour, and when we become clear about the purpose of intervention with such behaviour, we can become expert and creative in designing and selecting techniques and interventions to achieve treatment objectives. Knowing how to think about the purposes of behaviour and interventions is as important as knowing what to do. Informed thinking and goal setting can result in helpful, effective, and nonpunitive interventions.
Distinguishing between discipline and
punishment
The terms discipline, punishment, and consequences are often used in
discussion, and consequently in practice, as if they were the same
things. They are not. It is my conviction that an important ingredient
in the developing knowledge base which forms the base for the profession
of child care work is the ability to be clear about the distinctions,
and then to administer each according to deliberate plan and thoughtful
intent. The literal meaning of the term “to discipline” is to teach.
True “disciples” are learners! If we intervene with behaviour with any
intent other than to teach, we are not administering true discipline!
According to Webster “to punish” means to penalise, to cause pain, loss,
or suffering for a wrongdoing; to treat in a harsh manner. This literal
meaning has often been lost or blurred in child care literature, and
although I have great respect for many of the writers and teachers who
engaged in redefinitions, I have come to believe that the co-mingling of
terms to describe similar practices has led to a kind of confusion and
blending of motives that often causes harm, or at least a lack of
benefit, to youngsters who come into treatment following long years of “harsh” treatment in other environments. Redl (1980) went to great
lengths to redefine punishment in positive terms in a number of
writings, and went so far as to say that – as educators or clinicians,
our behaviour toward children deserves the name punishment only if it is
done with a clearcut goal to help the child. The ambiguity of the word “help” used in this context is worrisome to me because I fear that it
can be seen to give permission for hurtful practices under the guise of
helping children. Silberman (1970) gives support for this fear by
reminding us that in the interest of efficiency, discipline has often
been defined in “simple but rigid terms”, coming to mean the absence of
noise and movement, and the equating of discipline with obedience and
submission. Herschel Alt (1960) discussed the intermixing of terms in
his work on Residential Treatment for the Disturbed Child,
stating that “discipline took on harsh forms similar to those
traditionally employed in reformatories and prisons”. This blurring of
concepts has been acknowledged by Redl, even as he defended use of the
term punishment in a positive way, when he declared that, “the usage of
the term punishment, being as loose as it is, we often discuss under the
same label situations where we demand that a child “make up” for a hurt
he has inflicted, or a damage he has caused”. One can argue, of course,
that making reparation can “teach a child a lesson”. I agree, but would
argue that when dealing with emotionally troubled youngsters we cannot
assume this unless the act of reparation is framed in a way that is
not harsh or punitive, since most child care professionals admit
that mere “punishment” is not effective with troubled youth who have
histories of being treated in painful or disregarding ways. Krueger
(1980) reminds us that the very definition of punishment implies that
what is important is whether the offender experiences discomfort, not
whether there is a logical connection between the offence and the
discomfort – a connection that is difficult, if not impossible, for some
emotionally damaged children. Krueger goes on to support the notion that
discipline has been ineffective if a child does not learn more
appropriate behaviour and this “learning” is more certainly assured by
the administration of discipline than of punishment.
Clarifying the goals of intervention
Once clear about the distinctions between discipline (which we shall
define as an intervention designed to teach a new behaviour or way of
thinking) and punishment (which we shall define as interventions
designed merely to impose penalties or discomfort) we can move more
easily into a consideration of the purposes or goals for adult
intervention (sometimes interference) with unacceptable behaviour.
When we intervene and take something away (points, privileges, tokens, etc.) a very common practice in many agencies, or when we intervene in a way that is harsh, or that causes physical or emotional pain, we are punishing, no matter what we call it. I think a reference to the intention to teach is important here. As we mentioned earlier, one might argue that we cannot avoid teaching even when administering punishment. In a sense it is true that a child learns something from every interaction, even if what (s)he learns is that adults can be cruel, that might often triumphs over right(s), that they “deserve” to be hurt, etc. Our children have “learned” many things about the world that we wish they hadn’t learned. It seems to me that one of our primary tasks is to teach new lessons. We need to teach lessons about their worth and about the reality of fairness and available warmth and caring in the world. Children in treatment facilities do not need to learn about the harsh realities of life, but about the counter realities. This notion compounds our problem and task in thinking about and administering discipline. It forces us to look at each intervention from a stance that asks: “What am I teaching this child at this moment: What is (s)he learning from my behaviour in response to her/his behaviour? What do I want, or need, to teach this child at this moment? What will be helpful in gaining better control over her/his thoughts and behaviour?”
Discipline requires the ability to separate motive from action. We know, but sometimes we forget, that all behaviour is purposeful. Even though we sometimes claim it in our frustration, nothing is ever done “for no reason at all”. Behaviour is tied to a goal; to meeting a need. It often takes considerable skill to see and understand the meaning a particular behaviour has to a child. It also takes patience and respect for a young person's motives. Many times we decide what a child was “up to"; and many times I think we are wrong. Learning to discover the motives of behaviour is crucial in view of the aims of discipline, since I can’t teach another way of meeting a need until I know which need the behaviour was directed at meeting. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking. It’s amazing how often we don’t bother. Sometimes it’s true that even the child doesn’t know exactly what (s)he was wanting or needing. That’s why they need us! They need us not to slap penalties on them, but to help them figure out what they wanted or needed, and how they can go about getting it without being disruptive or destructive. I have never seen a child or young person who wanted or needed anything “bad”. I have always been able to approve of the need they were trying to meet, if not the method they chose to meet the need. I believe that many times kids simply don’t know how to get what they want in a way that is acceptable to us and healthy for them. They have never learned. With these lessons lacking, their behaviour backfires on them. Not only do they not get what they were after, but they get a lot they didn’t bargain for. What fertile ground for teaching and learning – for discipline. It seems important to keep in mind that if kids in treatment centres knew how to meet their needs more “appropriately”, i.e. acceptably, to us, they wouldn’t be there and they wouldn’t need us. But they do need us. They need us to provide discipline; to tell them not only what to stop, but what to start. In this way, discipline allows us to reaffirm while correcting. I can support what you want and need. I cannot support your methods, but I can teach you ways to meet your needs that will benefit you, the group, and our relationship. This kind of interaction allows us to be very clear and firm about expectations for acceptable behaviour while allowing the youngster to learn a little about what is causing his/her behaviour. We are also able to learn other possibilities for meeting the need without disrupting relationships and the individual's well-being. Discipline allows us to move into and past the specific behaviour in one interaction. Rather than punishing someone for throwing rocks and issuing commands that they stop throwing rocks (which will not doubt be ignored if there is no new learning), discipline allows us to confront the unacceptable behaviour, impose a meaningful, related consequence, work with the child on how the behaviour has backfired, and teach a new” behaviour.
Consequences
At this point it seems necessary to give some consideration to the
notion of “consequences”. According to the dictionary, a consequence is “that which naturally follows from a preceding action”. The key word for
us, in the context of this discussion, is the word “naturally”. How many
times do the consequences we impose in response to unacceptable
behaviour have a natural connection to the behaviour? What does a loss
of points have to do with a clean room? Or a broken window? How does the “privilege” of watching television relate to having trouble in gym
class? How frequently, though, are these kinds of totally unrelated
consequences levied against a child with no further work to provide the
discipline, the teaching, and the learning! The imposition of
reasonable, connected consequences becomes natural for the skilled child
care worker, teacher, or parent when the concept of discipline is kept
in mind: consequences designed with the specific aim of teaching the
youngster something related to his/her inability, at this point, to
behave (and meet needs) in a more acceptable manner. Glasser’s (1965)
notion of “responsible behaviour” in fulfilling needs is very applicable
here. It supports the idea of discipline as part of “reality therapy” in
learning to meet our needs in ways which are both successful and
respectful. This does not imply that point systems are ineffective or
that point losses and gains are not a part of good child care practice.
It does imply, however, that point losses and other deprivations, in and
of themselves, do not provide discipline. The point or token privilege
loss is the easy part; the difficult and challenging part, the
intervention part, is the related teaching consequence which accompanies
the loss, the part which will change the deprivation into a learning
experience. When we lose sight of this, we are likely to witness a scene
that is all too familiar in treatment: a useless, combative, frustrating
cycle of point/privilege deprivation which often “bankrupts” the child,
and exhausts and demoralises both the child and the caretaker. A
continual focus on the goal of intervention, i.e. the teaching of new
perspectives and behaviours, will prevent what Whittaker (1979) cautions
against when referring to discipline and punishment as “conspicuously
missing” a focus on the teaching of life skills. Whittaker reminds us
that the therapeutic milieu provides us with a rich environment allowing
a variety of formats for teaching alternative behaviours, and the
professionally oriented child care worker will learn to develop a broad
range of disciplining interventions when focusing on the mission to
teach, and re-teach, and feeling freed from the burden merely to
penalise. Finally, when considering the goals of intervention, we want
to remember that many, or most times, children do not see the world the
way we do. Children with damaged egos, or with inadequate or undeveloped
egos are unable (not unwilling!) to see things as we see them or as we
would like them to see them. One of our major tasks in treatment, and in
providing discipline, is to find a way to enable a child with a fragile
ego, a distorted and damaged sense of self, and a frequently
hostile/suspicious view of adults and the world, to learn something as a
result of our interventions and interactions. It’s as if some children's
egos are similar to damaged eyes: people who need glasses to see the
board cannot see the board without their glasses. It’s not that they
refuse to see the board; it’s not that they are unwilling “they are
unable! We could threaten, bribe, or take away privileges all day,
demanding that they read the board without their glasses, to no avail.
Many children/youth we work with in care have similar problems with
regard to their perception of the world; they just can’t see things as
we do, or as they are. How can we provide them with a pair of emotional
glasses, a different, more accurate way of perceiving things? This is no
easy task! It’s easier to avoid the challenge and simply send a child to
her/his room, or keep him/her home from an outing. These punitive
actions, however, will only serve to reinforce their notions of the
world. Discipline, instead of punishment, will afford an opportunity to
do our job, to teach, and not to hurt. Approaching behaviour from this
perspective allows us to “actively engage” troublesome “acting out” behaviour, as opposed to merely suppressing it through punitive sanction
(Long and Newman, 1980).
Discipline as a mutual process
Discipline is a mutual process and requires an interaction: it requires
a teacher and a learner; it requires mutual effort; it requires positive
motivation on the part of adult and child. Discipline is not something
that can be done to someone. My experience after nearly twenty-five
years' of workshops and conferences, staff meetings, and on-the-spot
exchanges, is that attention is usually focused primarily, or entirely,
on the child or teenager. This seems to me not only unfair, but
unhelpful, since the child accounts for only one-half of the necessary
exchange for discipline to occur. I am convinced that both the
children's and the staffs needs would be better served if we spent as
much time and energy examining our own motives and behaviours as we do
those of the youngsters. We are engaged in a field that demands personal
energy and investment to be professional! Our work meets many of our own
needs, as well as those of the children and youth we care for. Basic
needs are just that – basic. These needs are present in all: rich and
poor, black, brown, and white, troubled and healthy, young and not so
young. It seems that a failure to acknowledge this accounts for much of
the punishment which occurs in lieu of nonpunitive discipline. At any
moment in time, both children and adults are behaving in ways that are
designed to meet basic needs, the same needs. Adult needs for safety,
belonging, love, esteem, etc. are no less powerful or commanding than
those of the children. Neither are they more powerful. Often a problem
arises in adult-child interactions because the behaviour of the
child/youth interferes with or threatens our feelings of safety, our
need to feel loved, or to feel good about our abilities. For this reason
it requires extra effort on our part, to keep the needs of the children
foremost – evidenced by providing discipline rather than punishment – when we are feeling like they are behaving “against us”, or our love
care for them is not being returned, or we are doubtful about our
abilities because they refuse to comply with our requests and demands.
It is not immature or unprofessional to admit our needs; rather, I
believe it is unprofessional not to admit our needs. If we keep them out
of our awareness they will surely be expressed in ways that are harmful
to those in our care; consequently we will be unsatisfied. We must learn
to acknowledge and address our feelings in order to avoid blaming and
punishing the kids for not meeting our needs. We can develop our
competence so that we can recognise the feelings that arise from having
our own needs threatened, and prevent these feelings from interfering
with the administration of respectful discipline.
Much of the behaviour we are called upon to witness and attempt to correct is repugnant to us, and is often an affront to our own values. Names we are called would not have been tolerated by the adults in our lives. Many of the behaviours we see every day were never acknowledged in our families, schools, or churches. We can acknowledge that if “our” kids acted the way our parents, teachers and ministers told us kids were supposed to act, they wouldn’t need treatment and they wouldn’t be in our facilities. But at the same time our insides still get outraged when they do what they do! This is important to think about because it colours our interactions and interventions and often tempts us to want to hurt (punish) rather than help (discipline). Our feelings and repulsion tempt us to believe that kids are doing things to us, rather than to meet their needs in the only way they know. Our language often conveys these beliefs. For instance, we ask, “Did the kids give you a bad time?” as opposed to “Did the kids have a bad night?” How often do we refer to the kids as “making our lives miserable”, or “not co-operating with us”, clouding the fact that for the most part our lives are not an issue for them. They are trying to deal with their own lives. They act miserably because they are miserable, not because they want to do something to us.
The entire disciplinary situation is thus complicated by our own feelings and needs; our feelings, based on our own rearing, about the way children “should” behave and respond to adults, the way we were taught to respond. Most adults do not take well to having their rules broken, or their “structure” not followed. We were taught that adults were to be respected and obeyed. Children in treatment neither respect or obey; if they could, they would not need treatment. How often though do we arrive for work with well laid plans for pleasant events only to have them shattered by a fight, a broken window, a refusal to participate. Our emotional responses are (more often than not, regardless of our education or experience) to be agitated and unhappy with the offending youngster(s) and to feel personally upset and defied. Then we try to plan, to treat, to avoid the urge to punish (to do to someone else’s day what they have done to ours), and to provide an opportunity to learn a better way of handing things We stand there feeling like the altruistic, caring, nurturing, teaching caretaker and like a ticked-off adult who is angry, insulted, hurt and frustrated. The part of all adults that expects compliance, that gets caught up in status, that hates being defied and called names, makes it very hard to discipline. To move past this requires work – child care work.
Also it seems worthwhile to consider that child care workers usually do not have mainstream social ambitions. We do not work for money or for prestige. Male child care workers are often asked when they will get “real jobs”. Females wait for the professional recognition “not just credit for fulfilling motherly instincts. When off duty, child care workers are not known for faithfully following societal “rules”. It has always been interesting to me to observe the contrast between child care workers' values at and away from work. Off duty we follow our own heads and hearts: we speed if we’re late for work; we date according to our hearts and not for the approval of our parents or society; we resist war and drafts; we eschew material values. But once at work we become the paragons of rule enforcement, watching for infractions, punishing deviations from our expectations no matter how energised the reasons from the child. Trieschman, Whittaker and Brendtro (1969) caution us in their classic work The Other 23 Hours, of the need to check our own anti-social impulses by exercising excessive control over impulsive children, which may sometimes be a reaction formation which hampers the goals of treatment. This is said in the context of recognition that “control and management of disturbed children is a large and important part of the duties of child care workers” so we can see that it is not a caution against managing behaviour, but against allowing our personal agendas to interfere with appropriate discipline. An additional area for consideration while contemplating the mutuality of the process is a review of our own catalogue of personal childhood experiences, from which we draw when dealing with children, that includes a host of “interventions” (most of us called these interferences with behaviour from adults by other names) that were not particularly designed to provide true discipline. Many of our parents were at least honest and openly announced that we were “going to be punished”. Now that roles are reversed, and we are the interveners (interferers), we are often tempted to fall back on familiar patterns of intervention, even though we rarely consciously admit to the world or ourselves that we were out to punish children. What often seems to happen, based on a combination of our own childhood experiences, or unmet needs, and a lack of clarity about the nature of discipline, is that we say “discipline”, but practice “punishment”. This may take the form of ignoring, or simply reacting. It is a helpful exercise sometimes to recall some “consequences” we received that felt very unfair, or even “mean”, and to use this review not to revile those adults from our childhood who imposed them, for they did not claim to be professional, but to learn from them and to use the learning to enlighten our work with our youngsters. Consistency is a big word in child care circles and it should be. Consistency applies not only to expectations and structure, but to the need for consensus among caretaking adults about the motives and aims for managing behaviour. This requires a great deal more effort than making sure dinner is served promptly and that the homework hour is kept. It requires that we talk to each other about each other, and about ourselves, as well as about the kids. It requires that we work to overcome our human inclinations and that we become willing to challenge each other on punitive responses and interactions. It requires that we develop our own self-awareness, and that we become willing to use this awareness to change things about ourselves, as well as to focus on the changes we desire for the youngsters in our care. In addition to confronting unwanted behaviour, we need to learn to confront unwanted motives in ourselves.
These tasks are difficult, but not unpleasant. Discipline is always more positive than punishment. It feels better not only to the child, but to us. The mutuality gives a child an ally in his/her struggle to feel better and act better, not just a taskmaster. Learning feels good. Having someone take the time to teach you something helps you feel cared about. Being able to teach feels good too.
Thinking and the application of techniques:
A search for a therapeutic balance
The nature of, and need for, discipline requires that we develop a
deeper understanding of the interface between expectations and
therapeutic intervention when expectations are not met, rather than
defining our role only as that of setting limits and clarifying
expectations. It requires that we learn to treat children and
adolescents as full human beings, due all of the respect that we afford
each other and expect for ourselves. It means that we sit down and talk
things over, learn to see things from their point of view, get in touch
with the needs they are trying to meet with their behaviour – however
bizarre or unacceptable – and lend ourselves to them as allies for
change. We are agents of change, and that is the focus of our behaviour
management interventions. We are not mere custodians of the structure or
resources for keeping order or control. Discipline asks us to be sure we
can explain the reason for the rule, not just to enforce the rule. It
asks us to give up some of our pet phrases, such as “because I said so”, or “because I’m on duty”, or “because that’s the way it is here”. We
give these up because they do not teach. While the search for effective “techniques” is on-going, and always in order, so is the need to
remember that controlling techniques are by no means a final solution
(Krueger, 1980), and to keep in mind that reliance on “handed down” techniques alone can actually serve to reduce your power and
effectiveness in a given situation, if not combined with an
individualised, practical consequence to provide the learning. Krueger
reminds us that even “selecting proper intervention techniques requires
a great deal of preparation, communication and thought”. No child care
professional can be considered competent in his/her job without a wide
array of planful, respectful, effective techniques to be utilized in the
management of difficult or destructive behaviour. At the same time, we
need to be wary of employing a technique we learned in a workshop or saw
demonstrated by another worker without careful consideration of its
usefulness in a particular situation, with a particular child, to reach
a particular goal. it is not as important to know what I would do in a
given situation as it is to begin to instinctively evaluate each
situation; to become dear with regard to the specific goals of an
intervention; to design or implement an interventive technique that will
be suitable for the child and the incident, and that will produce
results which favour the well-being of the individual youngster, the
group, and adult(s) in charge. This approach will use our creativity and
ingenuity, will maximise the potential for effective use of proven
techniques, and will lead to results that enhance our relationships with
children/youth in our care and increase our own sense of competence.
Discipline as an ingredient in the process
of change
Although learning has intrinsic rewards, giving up familiar and
comfortable behaviours and replacing them with new ones represents a
major change, and children, like most of us, are likely to resist
efforts to change. It is important to understand discipline in this
context so that we do not become discouraged or disheartened or tempted
to refer to old ways of intervening when our new approach doesn’t yield
immediate results. Change, if it is to last, most often occurs
gradually, step by step, and will often be barely perceptible. For this
reason, we must be committed to the “rightness” of the process and goal,
and thus be willing to persist when the learning is as slow as learning
often is. It is helpful to keep in mind how long the old behaviours have
been in place and how they were learned during long years in
unhealthy/disturbed environments before coming to us. Krueger (1980)
reminds us that we need to care enough to show our children and young
people that they have the potential to change. He goes on to remind us
that “we seek to create an environment where all the participants – children and staff – are interdependent; care about one another and are
willing to challenge, support and aid each other in the process of
growth and change”. Change is also the desired outcome of punishment, as
Red (1980) reminds us that “the use of punishment implies an attempt to
produce an experience for the child which is unpleasant “based on the
assumption that sometimes the affliction of an unpleasant experience may
mobilize “something” in a child which, without such a “boost from
without”, would not have occurred”. The prompting for a change in
behaviour, sought by the imposition of either discipline or punishment,
will most often be considered as unpleasant by the child. The ingredient
that distinguishes between discipline and punishment will be the
motive of the adult who structures the consequence.
Discipline in action: Some requirements and
characteristics
Discipline takes more time, and requires more work than punishment.
Discipline requires that we do a lot of thinking before and during the
intervention, and asks that we design, not merely administer, an
intervention that will teach the young person something about the
situation, or about him/herself, and that it will enable the individual
to handle it better next time. We must consider who are behaving in the
unacceptable way, what we know about their history and makeup that helps
us understand why they are meeting their needs in an inappropriate way,
and how we can provide an intervention and consequence which will
facilitate effective learning. Discipline, as a practice concept, is
often avoided in favour of more punitive interventions simply because of
the demands on staff time and energy. It’s easier to have charts on the
wall, spelling out consequences for all manner of misbehaviour, to take
things away, to send someone to his/her room to “think”, than to take
the time to evaluate each incident of unacceptable behaviour, to use our
knowledge of the child and of individual and group dynamics to
understand the reason for the behaviour and to devise a consequence
geared for the needs of the individual youngster.
Discipline requires a focus on the individual. Similar behaviour does not spring, necessarily; from similar or predictable motivation. Each child must be considered in terms of his/her background, present coping skills, treatment needs, and abilities for learning. Six children may run away together, but each will run for his/her own, individual reasons. Punishment may, but discipline will not allow all six to be given the same consequence, because the necessary learning will be different for each. Who left because they have trouble controlling their impulses? Who left because they couldn’t say “no” to others in the group? Who left because in the past it has been safer to leave than to stay? Each has something to learn; each has a different capacity to learn; each deserves the respect to be seen and treated as a unique person with unique needs. Each deserves discipline.
Discipline cannot be forced. Punishment can be forced, but we cannot force anybody to learn. It thus becomes our task to provide the opportunity, to structure a learning situation, to give it our best shot. It becomes our task to give the learning the time.
Discipline enhances a child's self-image. Punishment damages a sense of self-worth. I don’t believe that it is true that children enjoy misbehaving and falling out of favour with the important adults in their lives. I believe, instead, that “acting up” is all some children know. It feels comfortable, it makes them feel like themselves, it reinforcess their negative self-images. I have never seen any evidence that it makes them feel good. Learning new ways to behave and handle emotions and difficult situations, learning more about themselves, learning that someone cares enough to struggle with them to help them change; this, I believe, feels good. Discipline allows the development of personal competence, and the sustaining of positive relationships with important adults, building a sense of worth and value. Isn’t this our commitment?
Discipline is hampered by previous life experiences. Kids who come into placement are, for the most part, undisciplined. They have been punished a lot; they have been ignored. Neither punishment or uninvolvement teaches responsible behaviour. A lifetime of being ignored or punished does not make it easy to receive discipline. Children tempt us to do what would be easier for us anyway, to ignore them, or punish them. It is a challenge for us not to respond in the way they seem to be asking and which makes them feel comfortable. Abused kids elicit abuse; they act as if they would rather be made to suffer, to be called names, to be yelled at or hit. They would rather be sent to their rooms (ignored) than to be disciplined. Most don’t feel they are worth discipline! They don’t understand our willingness to invest the time and effort. This willingness and investment, I believe, is at the heart of treatment! This is hard to keep “up front” in our minds when they get up in our face and beg us to punish them; when they wreck our nights and ruin our days.
Discipline is hard just because we’re human. Sometimes we have bad days. Sometimes we envy them the treatment they are getting at our hands because we’d like to have some for ourselves. Sometimes we’re just plain tired and irritated. These times call on all of our reserves, and all of our personal and professional commitment. We are here to treat them better than they were treated before we met them; to treat them better than we were/are treated; and to treat them better than we’d sometimes like to treat them.
Discipline, like love, requires patience and kindness. Punishment can be swift and impulsive. Who hasn't, in a flash of anger and frustration, been tempted to take away someone’s bathroom privileges, to ground them for two years, to send them to their rooms until they “grow up”? The commitment to provide discipline in these moments is much like the commitment to love the unlovable. It takes patience to explain and relate a consequence, to be sure that the behaviour enables us to provide a clear explanation for intervention, and to construct a consequence that changes, rather than confirms, a negative view of the world.
Discipline can be proactive as well as reactive. In fact, it is possible on many occasions to recognise that corrective discipline is necessary because of a failure to provide preventive teaching interventions. Selfishly, it is far more useful, less exhausting, and more pleasant to spend time with youngsters preventing misbehaviour than anxiously awaiting its occurrence and having to react to it when everyone involved is in an emotional state that decreases the chances of effective teaching and learning taking place. Too often we seem to wait for something awful to happen and then spend countless hours in meetings, consultations and ruminations deciding what to do in response. The beauty of the discipline framework is that it reminds us that, unlike punishment, which is only reactive, discipline/teaching can be done at any time. We can talk in advance about how to keep windows from being broken when Frank loses his temper; how we can handle feelings and challenges other than by running away, how to direct aggression into acceptable activities, etc. We can provide discipline in advance of disruptive behaviour. We can use that well developed ability to pick up on the warning signs, the “vibes” which signal the potential for something getting out of hand. We can teach as prevention and save all of us the bad feeling which results from “acting out” behaviour. This focus on prevention may, in many cases, cause us to re-evaluate our reward systems for direct care staff. it is unfortunate that so many strokes are given to child care workers who are good at “handing” difficult situations. To reinforce a focus on discipline, we should commend the child care worker who provides such good discipline that there is very little to handle. We also need to reward creative and constructive consequences, even if they appear “soft” in a context where punishment seems called for. In considering the difficult task of maintaining discipline in classroom settings, Silberman (1970) reminds of the difficulty arising when teachers become obsessed with silence and lack of movement in environments where this becomes the chief means by which their competence is judged, since this atmosphere hampers real learning. He reminds us that a group cannot achieve enough maturity to keep itself under control if its members never have an opportunity to exercise control. Rewards need to be given to workers who do not “control” the group, but who struggle with the group and its members to learn self-control, with the understanding that while learning anything, the practice cannot be compared to the desired proficiency. Learning to type means a lot of misspelled words at first. And learning new behaviours requires tolerance for the approximations which will eventually lead to the desired performance.
Conclusion
Discipline is one of our primary tasks as caretakers of children. It is
also one of our greatest challenges. It can be, when done as a way of
life with those in our care, one of our greatest rewards. Discipline
gives kids what they come to us to get; it is easier on us than any
amount of punishing; it works and it feels terrific. Watching young
people change their feelings about themselves “recognising their own
value and worth “is a thrill that never leaves a worker who has toiled
with and on behalf of this young one. Recognising that disciplinary
interactions, teaching kids that they deserve our time, our thought, our
planning, our creativity; teaching them that love and respect can be
found in this world as evidenced by the love and respect we can share
with them; teaching them that they can learn to meet their needs in a
way that enhances their own feelings about themselves as well as the
feelings toward them of others around them; sharing the joy and
confidence that comes from learning “these rewards will energise us and
give us the motivational push to keep on for another hour, another day,
another year.
Direct care workers tow a difficult line, searching for a blend of structure and freedom which allows children and young people the right to learn from their own mistakes, but which still lends them the protection of our experience as a buffer against unnecessary disasters. There will be times when the consequences we mete out will seem unreasonable to the child. At times like this, we need to examine ourselves to make sure they are indeed reasonable, and necessary, even if not understood. Anyone who has witnessed a two-year-old running out into traffic, convinced that all cars will stop while s(he) retrieves her/his ball, has experienced a moment when preventive discipline was the order of the day, whether the process was able to be mutual or not. There are other dangerous situations, which call upon our best skills in attempting to provide preventive discipline; most of us are not willing to allow teenagers to learn from the mistake of cutting their wrists, or taking a dangerous drug. It requires careful thought and lots of discussion between adults, to determine which situations we should step into and which we should allow to play out so that learning can occur from natural consequences. We need also to recognise that there are times when kids are not available for discipline: when they’re on drugs or alcohol; when they are blinded by rage; when they are out of touch with reality. Most often, these times will pass and the opportunity for discipline (as contrasted with control) will present itself and we will then buy up these moments after the storm, to try to teach another way of handing stress or peer pressure, remembering that the goal of discipline is self-control, self-discipline. It is when we see a child or teenager learn a better way to handle his/her feelings and impulses that we are paid for our work, not when we pick up our cheques.
References
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Redl, F. The concept of punishment, Conflict in the Classroom: The education of emotionally disturbed children. Fourth Edition, Wadsworth Publishing Co., Belmont, MA, 1980.
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Trieschman, A.E., Whittaker, J.K. and Brendtro, L.K. The Other 23 Hours. Aldine Publishing Co., Chicago, 1969.
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