How do you know what the right thing to do is, when it comes to disciplining your children? The simple answer is that you don't, but you have to try something, so you look back at how your parents raised you and what methods they used to enforce order in their house.
Some of us don't agree with what our parents did, maybe they force fed you at a table or made you stay there all night until you finished what was on your plate, maybe they locked you in a room or beat you with a garden hose. If you had bad disciplinary examples growing up but you still turned out alright you are probably not going to use the same tactics and have to come up with your own punishments.
There is no instruction manual on how to raise children, and all children are raised differently. So you try something, and maybe it seems like it works, so that punishment becomes your go to when they are misbehaving, until one day it stops working.
It doesn't matter what you come up with and you can't get discouraged when a tactic you used to use worked so well at one point but has now failed. You have to adapt to the situation, your children are going to get smarter therefore you will have to as well. The point is that you can never give up, and always keep trying.
Life with kids isn't all punishments and discipline, and they have questions that will make your head spin in amazement. Having a young child ask you an adult question puts all these emotional boundaries in place before you can answer the question. How do you answer a question that is completely age appropriate? I'm not going to explain sex to a seven year old, or explain what drugs an alcohol do when you are on them that is so fun that it makes you want to do them again. But I have to tell them something and I struggle with a good answer a lot of the time.
I don't know how to answer these questions but I do my best to give them the most informed factual answer that I can think of without being too descriptive and not to vague that they are still curious enough to try it for themselves.
I'm not a parent, sadly, I am only an uncle, but if being an uncle and having to answer the hard questions is taxing I can only imagine what a full time parent must go through. I must be doing something right, if the nieces and nephews I see on a daily basis trust me enough to ask deeply personal questions. Now if only there was a parenting manual on how to answer those questions, things would be so much easier.
Scott Goerz
