How Parents Discipline in Public Places - Essay Example

Parents Vary their Discipline Type in Public Places The location essentially affects the parent’s way of disciplining her child. In public places, the type of discipline employed by the parent is relatively different to the discipline type that she used at home. In general, parents try to avoid a scene wherein their children do misbehavior acts in public places. The trouble is that public places have things that create “clash of needs” (borrowed from Arnall) between the parent and the child.

In a grocery store, for instance, there are places such as checkout aisles -- where food items such as candies or chocolates are strategically placed -- that tempt the child to pick and eat goodies (Arnall, 2007, p. 154). The clash of needs transpires when the mother unloads her grocery items at the cashier section while her son unwraps the chocolate bar at the checkout aisle for consumption. When the child does not get what he wants, an unwanted scene is created: the child does temper tantrum.

Baumgardner (2003) says that temper tantrum is a “response of children not getting their way during a specific encounter” (p. 185). The mother is exhausted from carefully selecting and picking the items that she wants to buy -- considering the time and the mind she had allocated -- and the exhaustion is augmented when her son decides to do something which is unplanned and unimportant. Seldom, temper tantrum occurs when a child fails to have what he desires. Bergman (2001) counsels the parent not to give in to the child’s manipulation (p. 261). For him, temper tantrum is a sort of mechanism in which children greatly use in order for their parents to “get their own way” (Bergman, 2001, p. 261). On the other hand, mothers vary in their response to this kind of situation.

Some good mothers complain to the store manager for putting a “nag factor” (e.g., checkout aisle) in their grocery store. And some mothers talk to their children of what went wrong. Rosemond advises the parent to pose as a leader when an encounter happens in a public place. Calling this an Alpha Speech, Rosemond (2009) tells the parent to be more authoritative in her speech (p. 24). When the child picks and eats the chocolate, which is not part of the grocery list, the parent must speak to her son in a concise and direct manner.

Like a leader to his/her disciple -- the word “discipline” comes from the word “disciple” (Rosemond, 2009, p. 23) -- the parent must act and speak in a more decisive way. Conversely, I hardly see a parent spanking her child at the public place. In the United States in particular, spanking or any other physical sort of discipline is generally uncommon. Especially to white middle-class Americans, physical discipline in public places is not part of their system or values. Child abuse and neglect may be present and persistent but not in public places.

Parents mostly counsel their children through words or speech. Bergman’s advice is hardly followed by most white upper- or middle-class Americans. Rosemond’s Alpha Speech is fairly well but lacks reasonable dialogue. References Arnall, J. (2007). Discipline without distress: 35 tools for raising caring, responsible children without time-out, spanking, punishment, or bribery. Alberta, Canada: Professional Parenting Canada. Baumgardner, D. (2003). Communicable diseases of children. In R. Taylor (Ed.), Family medicine: Principles and practice (6th ed.) (pp. 166-177).

New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. Bergman, A. (2001). 20 common problems in pediatrics. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Rosemond, J. (2009). The well-behaved child: Discipline that really works! Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.