What is the wisest way to discipline your child? When I have a child I don’t plan on spanking them, instead I would punish them by taking their priviledges away for awhile (a week or two) and after halfway through their punishment if I see any change in my child’s behavior I would gradually give some of their privildeges back before their unpunished, I don’t really think spanking is a good way to discipline your child cause it could cause them to get angry and violent towards people cause they feel that it’s okay to hit people out of anger, I think that talking to your child about their behavior can make a difference in them and send them to their rooms for awhile.

I think that there are three main factors to discipline – consistency, fairness, and calm.

You seem to relate spanking with anger, and discipline in general. That shouldn’t be the case. Granted, there will be times that you will react instinctively, but hopefully you will most often have a chance to calm down before issuing punishment or discipline. With toddlers that isn’t usually an option, and a smack on a diaper-padded bottom will often convey your displeasure with their action without causing them any pain whatsoever. Always keep in the forefront of your mind that you’re trying to teach them something, not trying to hurt them. It’s that action, not the pain, that will make them learn.

Be Consistent: With older children, making sure that they know the rules AND the consequences if they break them, makes your job easy. But you have to stick to what you say – you can’t tell them that if they do that again you’ll send their head spinning into the next room, because they’ll know you won’t or can’t, and that lessens how seriously they take your rule not to do something.

Be Calm: Telling them that if they paint the kitchen with mustard again, you’ll take away their electronic privileges for a week, will seem possible and reasonable to them, and they’ll likely not do the deed again. Of course, since it never occurred to you to tell them not to paint the kitchen with mustard in the first place, you’ll have to handle the initial act with a calm discussion and perhaps a punishment of having to help you clean it up (you’ll have to help or it’ll never be done right, and it also teaches them). And always follow through with whatever punishment you assign to an infraction. That way they’ll believe you about that and other warnings.

Be Fair: Not only in your own mind, but in theirs. A punishment that is too severe for an infraction that really doesn’t matter much in the overall scope of things will only serve to make them quit caring a fig whether they break your rules or not. Don’t take them out of Little League just because they came home a half an hour later than you told them to; unless this is a long term problem and you’ve told them that that would be the punishment if they did it again.

Spanking is not a bad thing on its own. It’s that anger you were talking about that makes it bad.

My eight year old did something once that I hadn’t told him not to do, but it was necessary that he not do it again. It was important. So I told him that if he did that again, I would bend him over my knee and spank him. Since I had never spanked him before, he didn’t think I would, I guess, and he did it again. I told him that he had left me with no choice, that since I’d said I’d spank him, he’d forced me to have to do it. I said this with sadness and regret in my voice and eyes, went and sat down on a chair and called him over to me. I told him to bend over my knee, and when he did, I calmly gave his butt one good smack. I waited a minute, then gave him one more. Then I asked him if he thought that that was enough, and he thought for a minute before responding that no, it probably wasn’t. So I smacked him one more time, and let him go. The spanking didn’t hurt anything but his pride, he was fully clothed. But it made him think, and he never did that again. I believe that part of it was respect for me. I was calm, I was consistent, and I believe I was fair.

The best way to start out though, I’ve found, is to have an authority in your voice from the very beginning. Most of what you’ll be disciplining small children for will be things for their own safety, and there may be times when you’ll need them to react immediately to your voice, so instilling in them the need to do so right from the beginning may save their lives later. My kids knew that I would always explain afterward why I had urgently barked an order, and knowing that if I was issuing commands at the top of my voice I must have good reason, helped a lot.

I can’t imagine any reason, ever, that would warrant a punishment such as a beating or even a whipping, but the key to avoiding that isn’t making rules about never spanking, the key is not to react in anger. Don’t decide punishments when you’re angry, don’t allow yourself to react in an angry manner – THAT would teach them to do the same, and your ultimate goal in raising children is for them to become responsible, thoughtful, loving adults.

Never lose sight of the ultimate goal.

I don’t mean to preach, and I’m no college-educated expert, but I have raised all of my kids to adulthood, and believe me, I’ve seen it all.