KidLead - Are Kids Creative... Or Just Strong-Willed?
Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 5:15 AM 
When a child is acting out... parents often punish them. The goal is to extinguish the behavior with pain (emotional or physical). This may discourage a child from expressing their personality. Discipline, however, hones that behavior. It's about self-awareness, self-control and learning the reality of consequences.
I don't have a clear answer - but I do know if parents, in general, continue to squelch their children with punishment for most every infraction... we will likely find ourselves with a generation of creatively deficient overseers with very little leadership strength.
From the book, KidLead by Dr. Alan E. Nelson, "When you intimidate with verbal threats or punish kids exhibiting outgoing creativity, you damage their leadership development."
Agree? Why?
Reader Comments (1)
I am assuming there is plenty of context around this excerpt we are missing. More often than not, it is about striking a balance. I agree, parents who are too controlling and punitive in their approach to raising children are more likely to produce young adults who are not fully equipped to succeed in the world around them. The opposite is also true. A lack of control and discipline will also be more likely to produce young adults not as able to function well in the most critical areas of life. Therefore, I must assume the author's use of the word "discipline" in the above excerpt is critical and that his point is really that we need to discipline our kids, but not punish them. If that assumption is correct, then we also need to hear more about what the author considers punishment and what the author considers discipline.