Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey everybody, this week, to wrap up our series on effective discipline, I'm going to talk about discipline issues that lead to litigation. I'm going to group these discipline issues into two different categories. The first is a category of discipline that's not discipline at all, it's punishment. And not only is it punishment, it is abuse. And not only is it punishment, it is abuse. So if you engage in abusive punishment, that's going to lead to litigation. That's pretty obvious. But also there's a whole panoply of ways in which folks discipline their kids that tends to reduce the parent-child bond and over time that can lead to litigation. Because if your relationship with your child is starting to break down and the relationship with the other parent is improving, then ultimately, as the child becomes old enough to express a custodial preference, then they're going to tend to express it and it's going to wind up leading to litigation. A child who is unhappy in one home and happy in the other is going to tend to do something about it when they get the chance to do something about it. So first let's talk about abuse. So an example of abusive punishment is what can occur when you punish while you're angry. This could be physical or verbal abuse, so you beat your child with a belt, you leave welts, bruises. You curse at your child, scream at your child. Those kinds of punishments are not discipline at all. It's you being dysregulated and abusing your child. So certainly that will lead to litigation. Some teacher, some friend, the other parent, somebody eventually is going to get a sense of what's going on. It's going to lead to litigation. Corporal punishment itself can lead to litigation. Talked about how it's lawful. You can engage in some forms of corporal punishment, but it's unhelpful. And if you spank your child and you leave a bruise that is going to be visible, it may be technically legal, depending on how you do it. It's not a good idea. It can very likely lead to litigation now or in the future. Again, if your child is unhappy in your home and one way to make your child unhappy is to beat them, and one way to make your child unhappy is to beat them, punishing them, then that can lead to litigation later on.

Speaker 1: 2:29

Using fear, threats of inappropriate consequences, starts getting us into the area of punishment. That isn't as clearly abuse I would term it still abusive but it's going to degrade the quality of your parent-child relationship. So what do we mean by using fear and threats of inappropriate consequences. So one example might be if you don't clean up your room, I'm going to throw away all your toys and you're never going to see them again. If I catch you texting with your friend again after 8 pm, then I'm going to throw away your phone, or I'm never going to let you talk with that friend again.

Speaker 1: 3:07

Those kinds of outsized consequences that don't make any sense, that are just meant to intimidate and scare instead of being to instruct, those will tend to degrade the quality of your parent-child relationship. Emotional manipulation, guilt-troping, shaming that kind of language will have the same effect. So saying things like you know, if you really loved me, you wouldn't act this way, or if you really loved me, you would choose to go with me this weekend instead of your other parent, or if you were truly a good boy or girl, you wouldn't act this way. You're a bad person. You know. Good boys and girls don't ever act this way. Those kinds of emotional manipulations, guilt trip, shame those are all techniques that are lacking to them, which tend to harm your relationship with your child, isn't teaching them anything other than you're an emotionally unsafe person, and that's the kind of discipline that can ultimately lead to litigation, consistent and arbitrary punishments.

Speaker 1: 4:14

Kids have no control over pretty much anything. They have control over what goes in their mouths and what comes out of their bodies, but very often that's about all that they can control. When you can't control anything, you want everything that's out of your control to be as fair as possible. So kids are highly attuned to fairness than how their parents treat them, especially if you have other siblings, if there are step-siblings in the picture. Having inconsistent punishment between siblings is unfair to the children. They perceive it to be unfair is unfair to the children. They perceive it to be unfair. They may not understand, maybe, some fine distinctions that you're making between the kids and how you're determining the punishments.

Speaker 1: 4:58

So your punishments have to be consistent among the other children in the household. They also need to be consistent with the history of how you have disciplined in the past. You know, if you establish a certain type of discipline for certain types of infractions and then one day, because you're emotionally dysregulated and you are angry, you give a punishment, the punishment that you're giving is now all of a sudden, just out of this universe and consistent with what you've done before. That's going to lead to difficulties in your relationship with your child. They're going to trust you less. You're going to become their minds more of a dangerous person. It's going to harm your attachment to them. The punishments are arbitrary, not necessarily inconsistent with your past history of punishment, maybe not even inconsistent with the punishment that you give to the other children in the household, but just seems to come out of left field. It just doesn't make any sense. An objective third-party observer looking at the offense and looking at the punishment would not be able to understand how the two go together. That's an arbitrary punishment that also feels unfair to children.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Punishment as retaliation against your co-parent. So let's say that your co-parent has, you know, worked with you to come up with some sort of special deviation on a special occasion from the schedule in order for the child to be able to do something fun. It can be where there's a birthday party or a wedding or something on the other parent's side of the family that the kids really want to go to and the parent has worked with you to come up with a compromise to allow them to do it. Then you start getting upset with the other parent. Maybe they didn't follow through on something else. For whatever reason, you want to get back at the other parent. So you take this fun thing that the child has already been told that they can do, has already been arranged, and now you say oh, you know you're in trouble for this. You know you got a B plus instead of an A, or you didn't clean your room or you didn't get your homework done by the time I said to get it done. So now you're going to be punished, and that punishment is you can't go to this fun thing that you were planning on going to.

Speaker 1: 7:12

That's not really a punishment directed at the child. That's an arbitrary punishment that is really being used to attack the other parent because you're frustrated with them about something that they did. Your children will eventually see through that kind of thing. You know. Maybe it's the case that the other parent got your child some sort of toy or a phone or something that they're allowing to go between the homes. Maybe you get frustrated at your parent so you ground your child from having that thing at your home. It's not even necessarily something your child did that would warrant that kind of punishment. It's not even necessarily something your child did that would warrant that kind of punishment. If you do that, then again that's going to start to harm your relationship with your child because they're going to see that they're just sort of. Ultimately, they'll see that they're just kind of a pawn in this larger game that you're playing.

Speaker 1: 8:05

A big area in which folks get in trouble with their discipline is involving a step-parent or romantic partner in the discipline. Research shows that it could take up to seven years before the relationship between a step-parent and child is sufficiently strong to permit that step-parent to be actively involved in punishment and discipline. One of the things that we've talked about on multiple occasions is that you have to connect before you can direct, because children perceive direction to be the same as correction. So a big mistake is to introduce some new adult into the mix and then automatically say hey, you know this is now your stepfather. You have to do what he says, or just wait till your stepfather gets home. Or, you know, the father gets married to the stepmother and automatically wants to push all of these household duties onto her, including discipline. This is your stepmother, now you have to follow what she says. This is a stranger to this child. Your child doesn't love the step-parent. You're in love with the step-parent. They're not. Doesn't love the step-parent. You're in love with the step-parent. They're not. They haven't created this new cultural common ground that is the basis for a strong relationship that could then carry the burden of having some discipline involved in it.

Speaker 1: 9:23

This is something that we talk about in detail in our courses Introducing a New Romantic Partner and Success and successful stepfamilies. It is extremely unfair, both the step-parent and to the child, to involve the step-parent or romantic partner if they aren't getting married in discipline, for a significant amount of time has passed before they've had the chance to build a relationship that can support the introduction of discipline into it. Also, if you have a step-parent who's bringing in their own biological children, inevitably your children and the children of the step-parent want to be comparing notes about how they get treated, and it's very easy for a child to perceive that the step-sibling is getting preferential treatment or that they're getting worse treatment just because they're not the biological child of the step-parent. It is a very complicated and convoluted situation. We start involving step-parents into discipline, especially when there are step-siblings involved. It's just an invitation to litigation. It's a recipe for disaster. So can I encourage you highly enough to leave step-parents romantic partners, out of discipline for years. Now they can help implement punishment. They can help keep a child safe, but they should have minimal, minimal interaction with discipline.

Speaker 1: 10:51

A very long period of time meaning years, not months as a child ages and they go through different developmental stages types of discipline that can lead to litigation, change as well. As children are younger. You're talking about things like how do you potty train, how do you do bedtimes, how do you monitor screen time, things like that. If you're putting a child in timeout, there's right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it. It's better to think of it as time in as opposed to time out. If you're putting your child in timeout into facing the corner, sort of ostracized from everybody else, you're introducing some measure of shame into the punishment, and we talked about how shame is unhelpful. So if, instead of a time out, you go sit with your child in a place that gives them a chance to calm down and relax you're not having a conversation, you're not trying to teach them anything at the moment, just being with them as they're taking a few minutes out to calm themselves then that's a proper way to do it. That also will build your ties to that child. It'll help strengthen your emotional connection and will get you both to a more calm place where you can then have actual discipline.

Speaker 1: 12:09

So as you go up through these developmental stages, you're going to get to things like extracurriculars. You know, maybe one parent is supporting extracurriculars and one parent isn't. If you have a child who's just passionate about a sport and one parent refuses to take the child to practices and so that child doesn't get the playing time that they would get otherwise, or they refuse to go to the games and support the child, or they go to the games but make it obvious they don't want to be there, or they get into arguments with the other parent and ruin your child's time. Now these are all different ways in which something that's very important to the child is being squashed by one parent. Punishing a child and you know to tie more closely into discipline, punishing a child by reducing their participation in an extracurricular activity that they've grown to love is very likely going to come across as arbitrary or for the top.

Speaker 1: 13:11

As the child gets older, their job is to individuate, and some parents do a better job of letting them individuate than others. So if you have a parent who's holding on too tightly in terms of what the child wears or what kind of friends the child has use of a vehicle by a teenager or a teen getting a job. These are all areas where you have to obviously have appropriate limits in place limits in place. But if a parent clamps down too tightly and tries to keep a child from doing the kinds of growth and individuation that they need to do to be ready to move out of the house, well then the child is going to chafe under that and at this point the child is definitely old enough to express a custodial preference. Much more likely to get litigation at this stage. And also you're going to find judges who will say you know, once a kid is able to drive, there's not a lot I can do. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to arrest the kid because they don't want to go have parenting time with you?

Speaker 1: 14:16

So these kinds of behaviors that don't recognize the developmental growth of your child will lead to what they refer to as resist-refuse dynamics, where a child either resists or refuses going to the other parent's home. Now, sometimes when we see resist and refuse dynamics, it's possible that there's alienation going on. But in what we're talking about today, we're talking about one parent estranging themselves from the children by not recognizing, not supporting the very natural developmental processes that a child goes through as they reach adulthood. So that was a fairly brief summary today of some of the discipline mistakes that can lead to increased litigation. Again, we had them in two categories Discipline that's not really discipline at all, but rather abusive punishment. And then discipline that weakens the parent-child bond and increases the chance that a child is going to eventually have a preference to be with one parent as opposed to the other.

Speaker 1: 15:20

To help avoid these kinds of improper discipline, refer back to the books that we've read as part of this series, especially Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, and no Drama Discipline. Don't think about punishment. Think about discipline. Don't discipline when you're upset or dysregulated. Make sure that both you and your child are calm and are able to have a connection before you attempt to correct them or impose any kind of discipline. And then make sure that you are aware of and supportive of your child's developmental changes. Remember that your job is to help them grow up and separate from you and become distinct adult individuals who are capable of going out into the world and hopefully want to come back sometimes and see you too, if you keep in mind the proper objective of discipline and the fact that your child is a separate, unique person, has their own life to live, you can avoid a lot of these errors in discipline that lead to increased litigation.

Speaker 1: 16:37

Okay, I believe that is the end of this series on effective discipline. I don't know what the next series is going to be. I'm going to think about it. Next week will either be a one-off on a discrete topic that I'm thinking about during the week, as I'm also thinking about what the next series will be, or it'll be an introduction to the next series, not quite sure. If you have any thoughts about what you think a good series topic would be, let me know at podcast at co-parent academycom. You have a fantastic week. Talk to you soon. Thanks.