Alternatively, examine your assumptions about your relationship with your child, and try to identify how you both ended up at such a place. Is playing such adversarial games really normal for a family that you’d like to be part of? That you would like to have grown up in?
It’s not clear to me that sending someone to their room with no TV/computer/food/whatever is a line that most parents are unwilling to cross. So, the utility of the strategy on the kid’s part seems questionable. Is she really prepared to play for those sorts of stakes?
As to whether most parents should be willing to cross that line or not, I don’t feel one way or the other about it. It’s part of what I remember of the coercion that I got when I was growing up. But would I have been better off without it? -shrug- There are examples of parents who don’t seem to do that sort of thing—but they seem to be more generally better people than my parents so… just removing the coercion in one regard in my parents wouldn’t necessarily get you something good.
In a sense it’s like saying: Imagine your perfect world. There’s no X in it, therefore we should never X.
Alternatively, examine your assumptions about your relationship with your child, and try to identify how you both ended up at such a place. Is playing such adversarial games really normal for a family that you’d like to be part of? That you would like to have grown up in?
It’s not clear to me that sending someone to their room with no TV/computer/food/whatever is a line that most parents are unwilling to cross. So, the utility of the strategy on the kid’s part seems questionable. Is she really prepared to play for those sorts of stakes?
As to whether most parents should be willing to cross that line or not, I don’t feel one way or the other about it. It’s part of what I remember of the coercion that I got when I was growing up. But would I have been better off without it? -shrug- There are examples of parents who don’t seem to do that sort of thing—but they seem to be more generally better people than my parents so… just removing the coercion in one regard in my parents wouldn’t necessarily get you something good.
In a sense it’s like saying: Imagine your perfect world. There’s no X in it, therefore we should never X.