King Cobra said:
if the parents fully explain the "why" so that the child understands the consequences of violating that rule
Allow me a moment to take this suggestion seriously
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I remember when I had had a head full of such lofty and noble ambitions about child rearing as the ones you've described at length.
Then I had kids.
Real kids.
Not the perfect little theoretical ones the parentless are always imagining with the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon and the guilelessness of Jesus. Don't get me wrong. You absolutely must teach your kids right and wrong. But that by no means guarantees that they'll choose the right. Kids who are too wiggly, too immature to pay attention or remember what they can and can't do, too brazen or curious to care will often end up in trouble. And that's pretty much all of them.
I've got a child, 5, who angrily flings chopped strawberries in syrup on the carpet when she gets told in a calm, respectful tone that she needs to clean the room she trashed. She's pissed because she hates to clean, and no amount of patient reasoning with her at that point is going to sound like anything other than nagging to her.
So now, my young Dr. Spock (and I don't mean the Vulcan), how at this point are you going to get her to learn responsibility and clean her mess?
A cooling off period? Doesn't that reward her for staining my off-white carpet, subconsciously communicating to her that this is an effective strategy for avoiding the very thing she doesn't want to do?
A threat? "If you don't clean your room, I'll clean it, and everything I pick up will go to the Salvation Army?" Not a bad idea, but that punishes both of us because it's still her mess, her room, her things that
I'm cleaning, so she learns nothing about responsibility, and if I get rid of them all then she'll just cause more trouble by playing with things that aren't hers (and I'd have to replace the clothes I got rid of, which is money out of my pocket and turns into an easy way for my little clothes horse to get a new wardrobe). Moreover, it does nothing to deal with the now more immediate problem that strawberry juice is seeping into the carpet and will leave a permanent stain if it isn't cleaned quickly, which is also her responsibility since she made that mess too.
You see, often the problem isn't just education. It's also motivation. Motivating my child to be responsible. To correct her mistakes.
I'll tell you what I did. I put her over my knee and gave her one spank. Not a particularly hard one. I can't say if the House of Lords would, on inspection, find any inordinate posterior redness, but it was enough to mildly humiliate and humble her, to bring her back to her senses (like the old-fashioned movie cliché "Snap out of it!" slap on the face), and remind her that she does not run the asylum. She cleaned the strawberry mess. She cleaned her room. She wasn't happy about it. There were tears. But the motivation was there, and the concept of responsibility was reinforced (despite however little it may have sunk in these things take time).
I make a point of being kind to her later, to remind her that I do love her. And the way she'll bring me her drawings and tell me they are presents to me, or just come and sit on my lap and put her arm around me and tell one of her knock knock jokes (that, invariably, aren't funny, but she thinks they are) tells me she does not spend her life cowering in fear of me. She knows I love her and I know she loves me. But we are not equals. I am her father, not merely her friend. And sometimes she gets out of control. And I have to be firm on those occasions because I am responsible for teaching her responsibility.
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I think a lot of your idealism stems from your age. You are, if I'm not mistaken, a teenager, correct? I can't imagine spanking a teenager. It seems ludicrous. You are old enough to reason with. But that doesn't work with young children.
This is not to say that you are equal to your parents yet. No sir. I just saw the movie "Elephant" today. It's a fictionalized account of the Columbine massacre. In one scene we see the killers opening the front doors of the school and walking in with their weapons. Then we cut to three girls in the cafeteria, talking. One is complaining that her mother woke her up again rifling through her bedsheets and searching her room. The part of me that is only 10 years removed from high school first thought that that's an incredibly insulting invasion of privacy. Then the parent in me realized that if Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris' parents had snooped through their kids' things even once a lot of people might still be alive today.
Parenting isn't easy. It isn't cut and dry right and wrong. It's easy to go too far. It's easy to not go far enough. It's common to have no idea if you're doing the right thing. It's easy to forget that your kids are growing and changing and what was appropriate last year might not be appropriate this year.
My point? I wish the critics without kids would sit down and be quiet. You'll never know what being a parent is like unless you are actually a parent.
Oh, and thank your parents for trying. They may really suck at it (my mom gets an A+ for teaching me how to read and write and love learning and an D- for emotionally mature parenting), but I guarantee they love you and are trying about as well as they know how.
