Should We Punish the Child When Necessary?

Specialist Clinical Psychologist Müjde Yahşi gave important information about the subject. Punishment is one of the controversial issues in child education. While some educators or psychologists argue that punishment is effective in behavior education, some experts argue that punishment harms the child's mental development. In the meantime, parents may also be undecided about whether to resort to punishment in their children's education.

Before you punish your child, you need to understand why your child is doing that behavior you don't want. So, is your child lying because he is afraid of you, is he not studying because he is depressed, or is he biting nails because he has attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder or because his academic success is low or his anxiety increases? You should be able to recognize it.

Children's behaviors that we see as negative depend on psychological reasons. The behavior you want to punish is actually a signal that the child's psychological needs are not being met sufficiently. Instead of punishing, we should first ask ourselves why my child is doing this behavior. If we can guess why, you should be able to solve it not with punishment, but with the love, attention or discipline he needs.

Instead of punishment, the method you will apply to the child will be to deprive the child of something he loves. But while doing this, it is important that you do this by targeting only the behavior without targeting the child's emotions. For example, you will deprive the child of the tablet for a certain period of time, who does not do his homework on time, but while doing this, you said to the child, "How many times have I told you to do your homework, you don't obey, look ahmet, do all your homework. How is he doing it, then you don't have a tablet", we target the child's feelings and this method we apply is not a deprivation but a punishment.

Punishment targets emotions, deprivation targets behavior. So instead; You can say that you take a break from playing with the tablet until you start doing your homework regularly, or you can say that if you prefer not to do your homework, you would prefer not to play with the tablet. Your child may insist or cry in this situation, but you should definitely not persuade and you should avoid long explanations so that your child does not resist.