Should you spare the cane?

Banking research analyst Monina Mahmood has never laid a hand on her four-year-old son, Ashman Ehsan, not even when the boy throws a tantrum in public and causes much embarrassment.

“Once, he kicked up a fuss about not wanting to leave the mall. He started screaming when we picked him up. We just held onto him and headed to the car. After he calmed down for a bit, we spoke to him and got him to understand that his behaviour wasn’t at all acceptable,” says Monina, 32.

For mother-of-two Kamala Velautham, harsh parenting is also simply out of the question. Like Monina, Kamala has never spanked her child. She equates spanking to child abuse, and strongly advises parents against it as a “shortcut” to hush a naughty one.

“I passionately believe in nonviolent solutions for everything – we shouldn’t discipline by instilling fear. Even severe scolding isn’t all that good for children. I’m against any method that makes a child so fearful that he stops doing something just because he is scared and not because he understands why,” says the 41-year-old IT project manager.

Monina and Kamala’s approach to disciplining their children is typical of parents these days. But just a generation or two ago, parents wouldn’t think twice about spanking or caning their children.

It was the accepted way of keeping children in check, and disobedience was punished with physical pain. These days, parents are more inclined to raise their eyebrow, then persuade their children to behave by reasoning with them.

Smart parenting

Kamala moulds her children’s behaviour buy teaching them about cause and effect. “There are consequences to every action – you need to communicate that to your kids,” she says.

For this very purpose, Kamala created a “thinking chair” for her two children, five-year-old Dharshana and three-year-old Jaiyeshwarr Sivaneshwaran.

“It’s basically a chair we set up in a corner of the house. Whenever the kids are naughty, we’ll send them to the chair. They have to think over what they did wrong and sincerely apologise before we’d allow them to leave the chair,” she explains.

They started using the chair when Dharshana was a year old. It took awhile for the children to understand what the thinking chair was for.

“She kept trying to get up and I kept putting her back. It was heartwrenching for me to see her cry but I’m glad I persisted. The thinking chair is all we’ve ever used to instil discipline, and it has been good enough so far,” Kamala observes.

According to clinical psychologist Jessie Foo, 29, most parents today view corporal punishment in the home as a “last resort”. It means parents are actually becoming smarter, not softer, she stresses.

“Research has shown that severe disciplinary methods like spanking will only reduce a child’s self-esteem and at the same time, increase his anger and anxiety levels,” explains Foo, who facilitates group therapy sessions and psycho-educational workshops for parents and children at the Shine Guidance Centre in Petaling Jaya, Selangor.