Today's Discipline

Is it just me, or are we the crazy parents? I can’t tell. The world seems full of parents doing a fairly decent job (or at least Kara’s schoolmates seem well adjusted), but few things in my experience come without maximum complexity. Whether it is her medication, her ADHD, her new environment, her crazy parents, genes, TV, or depravity, our Kara is just rude. She storms around the house like today’s little queen, ordering us about in a universe which bends obsequiously to her every whim. Egad! At first, we took it fairly flat-footed. We were like those tourists during the tsunami who wandered out wide-eyed to see where all the water had gone. But going on a month now, we are beginning to paddle.

Discipline is not a welcome houseguest. All my happy little family fantasies are absent of crying and stomping, absent of frustrating irritation and the stubbornness not to give way before the most furious bellowings of pint-sized protest. My happy family fantasies are all about laughing with each other over a boardgame, taking a walk together on a sunny Saturday afternoon, or playing that fun dad-game called “swing the kid” in its multitudinous varieties. Discipline’s school-marmish attitude and hawkish demeanor nips such saccharine projections with a neck-pinch of absolute reality. Yes, Discipline is not a welcome houseguest, but she is a necessary one (besides, I’ve heard she’s pretty good at expelling saucy, royal attitudes.)

Given the ubiquity of the need, and the plethora of practices—if not wholesale traditions dividing along countries of origin, religious culture, or political affiliation—you’d think there’d be some decent material on domestic corrections. For that matter, why not a journal? American Baby and Parenting Magazine move over for Today's Discipline. In its glossy pages, attractive actors-now-parents tell us their disciplinary foibles in melodramatic four-hundred-word anecdotes. Psychologists write state-of-the-discipline pieces about homestyle-behaviorism and the cost/benefit of antidepressants. We run our eyes over backmatter ads for affordable finishing schools. And each cover of TD features a gorgeously coiffed little cherub in mid-pout with a satisfied model-mom nodding knowingly in the background. Unfortunately, no such rag exists, and tradition is what’s left to go on.

My parents had a limited, but effective disciplinary repertoire. I was confined to my room a number of times, and there were TV restrictions. My mother treated a messy room a la Stephen Hawking: pulling all the higgledy-piggledy into a central point, into a landfill-looking heap which swallowed the center of my room. It was dismemberment or worse if it wasn’t put away, and so, complaining, I’d get about it. Another of her favorite disciplinary games was nose-in-the-corner. And yet I became so creative in avoiding boredom that she had me stand in the tub (and, trust me, there’s nothing interesting about the rounded, white side of a shower insert). I can't say much about L.'s end of things, but I do know that on one occasion her dad set her down in front of the King James Bible and had her begin copying it from Genesis chapter 1.

And so, it is game on at our house! Toys have been confiscated. Bedtime has been moved up by half-hour chunks into the day. In short, we’ve dug in against this little queen of the night. We’re shooting for manners, politeness, courtesy, and even a few fruits of the Spirit before it’s all over in 2018. And, as I’m like to point out, we have as much time as it needs. “This isn’t being angry,” I calmly advised our fair-haired six-year-old last night as she grunted and whined through minute four of a five-term timeout, “it’s called parenting. You’d best get used to it.”