I don’t think it’s even news that I was very stubborn growing up because even as at now I still find myself being stubborn once a while. As someone who grew up with boys and did almost everything a stubborn kid would do, I wasn’t afraid of punishment. My brothers would often say the worse thing that could happen to us for doing something we’ve been told not to do was punishment so we always had to psych our mind for the aftermath of our actions: punishment
I laugh when adults try to correct children of today/Gen Z using cane or positive punishment. Even back then, see the kind of mentality my brothers and I had. For us, the punishment was a small price to pay for our agenda and we were always ready. I had an innocent face too so it would take you a while to know that I was behind whatever wrong thing that happened at home. Abena, don’t do this….in my head I’m thinking you’re definitely joking or something because when you take two steps away I’ll do it and take my receipt.
Funny enough, I was an Angel in school but my brothers weren’t. For them, they had a brand to keep and I also hand mine to keep so they would do their stubborn things both in school and at home. I on the other hand would just do mine at home, not in school. From my experience, you can’t get a child to change with canes or punishment. They will only get immune to them. They’ll just psych their minds to get ready for the punishment anytime they do the wrong thing. The heartbreaking thing is beating a child because he genuinely got something wrong….Are you serious? If he understood what he was taught, would he have gotten it wrong?
It gives me great joy to see that schools no more cane students because there are better ways to handle such issues.
Anyway, the only trick my mom did which worked was enforcing negative punishment which involves taking away things appealing to us. She started banning us from playing games. Taking our controllers away. Seizing our skateboards. Anything that had to with fun ended up being taken away the moment we did something wrong.
From there, we started using our heads and then even started getting angry at whoever did the wrong thing because if I did something wrong, it would mean my mom would take something from all of us. This can be applied anywhere because kids hate it when you take things they like. Have you ever taken something from a kid and then he/she starts crying but the moment you ask him to say please, he says it just so he could get his thing back? Yeah, it’s like that.
As I said earlier, I’ve been gangster most of my childhood…I’m sure you definitely understand what this means if you’ve read to this point. So I believe in negative punishment not the positive one because it barely yields result unless you’re dealing with “fearos”.
All Images are mine
