It was one of those less Shabbos table-friendly parshiyos, the awesome tochachah of parshas Ki Savo. Rabbi Epstein was doing his best to explain the frightening punishments Moshe foretold for the wayward Jewish Nation in a way that even his youngest children could understand.

With the candor of youth, six-year-old Yitzy threw out a penetrating question: “Why does a father punish a kid if he knows the punishment will make him angry and do worse things?”

“Why indeed?” ask many parents. Do punishments accomplish anything at all?

Just a generation or two ago, it was a given that misdemeanors were met with firm discipline, but a wave of innovative parenting methods has swept through the world, permeating Jewish homes as well as non-Jewish. Today, experts espouse a plethora of flavors of discipline: You can sample positive parenting, Love and Logic, attachment parenting discipline, boundary-based discipline, or Gentle Guidance (yes, it’s capitalized because it’s a Thing). You can use logical consequences, natural consequences, or none at all.

With almost as many choices as there are children, how is a confused parent to respond?

Love Conquers All

Early on, Yael decided that consequences didn’t fit into her model of a loving home. A teacher, business owner, and mother of four, Yael believes strongly in her children’s innate goodness and assumes there’s usually a reason for challenging behavior.
“We generally view off-track behavior as a cry for help and we respond by connecting, not trying to coerce different behavior. It sometimes looks permissive, but I’m clear that it isn’t,” says Yael.
When otherwise reasonable kids tantrum, hit, or act in generally obnoxious ways, it’s usually the result of what neurology terms an “amygdala hijack” — an emotional response that is disproportionate to the trigger and overwhelms the person’s rational mind. In other words, the child who is sobbing hysterically has been hit by a tsunami of emotion and simply can’t respond to reason.

For this reason, Yael doesn’t do time-outs. Instead, they have time-ins, in which a parent goes with the upset child to a quiet place to be there for him while he calms down.

Yael recalls a time when her philosophy was tested when her daughter Leah was three. When baby Esther was born, Yael asked Leah to sit in their new double stroller for a minute to check the fit of the seat — whereupon the little girl dissolved in a puddle of tears.

Yael cringed under the accusing gaze of her in-laws and several other bystanders; they all seemed to wonder why she was letting a three-year-old call the shots. But Yael stood firm and held Leah soothingly for the duration of a 40-minute tantrum. Finally, Leah quieted down and said in a small voice, “But if we get a double stroller, it means we aren’t sending Esther back to the baby store.”
“It was clear something else was going on. It turned out that her life was really different now — she was mourning,” remembers Yael. “As adults, we want to be treated this way. We want to be met with compassion.”

Since most misbehavior stems from a deeper source than simple defiance, Yael believes, reacting with consequences is like slapping a Band-Aid on a gaping wound — ineffective at best, damaging at worst.

If the results are any indication, Yael’s approach seems to be working: Her children are responsible and respectful, and when asked how she’d deal with various scenarios of misbehavior, Yael’s response is invariably a wrinkled brow and evident unfamiliarity: “I don’t know, we just don’t have those problems.”

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 617)