Scare tactics seems to be one of those fallback parenting techniques that just won’t go away. While it may seem like “putting a little fear” into our kids works for the short term and stops immediate behavior, in the long run it causes our children additional anxiety and may influence them to NOT trust us as parents. I am of the opinion that using scare tactics is something that really DOESN’T work as a discipline technique or a way of building a solid parent-child relationship with our kids.
My theory is that the world is a scary enough place at it is. Our children are naturally subjected to all sorts of fears, anxieties and uncomfortable realities just by living in this world at the time they’ve been born. Why should we, as the people who are supposed to love, protect, and provide security for them, inflict even more fear into their lives? I think there is a difference between sharing factual, age-appropriate information with our children about dangerous and scary things—they should know about stranger safety and playing with matches and running after a ball in the street—and using fear as a means of control and behavior-shaping.
When I was a young child, I had one grandparent who was rather “old school” and used to use scare tactics regularly. She was the one who told me that if I bit my fingernails, the shards of nail would become imbedded in my stomach lining and cause internal bleeding. I was horrified. While it didn’t stop me right away from biting my fingernails, I did get very stressed every time I got a stomach ache and had miserable visions of the tiny shards of kid fingernails digging in and growing into my innards.
As parents, we’ve come a long way from those “old school” parenting ways, but we still might be inclined to turn to fear and hyperbole when we want to get a point across to our children. The thing is, we either add extra fear and anxiety to our children’s psyches, or they may also become eventually numb to ordinary anxieties and assume that the world is so dangerous they may as well just ignore it—OR, they cease to trust us because they feel like we are not being honest and direct with them. Scare tactics may change immediate behavior, but they will not help build character or create lasting change in our children.
See Also: Sending Kids to Bed Early as Punishment
Whatever We Pay Attention To…Grows
Can You Stay Calm and Neutral During Discipline?