Parents Give Up on Discipline

RUSH: Get this, folks. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me. “About one in three parents in the United States and Canada do not think their methods of disciplining their children work well, according to a U.S. study.
“Dr. Shari Barkin, chief of general pediatrics at Tennessee’s Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt found 31 percent of about 5,000 parents surveyed said they ‘never’ or ‘sometimes’ perceived their methods to be effective. Many of those reported turning into their own parents when it came to discipline, with 38 percent using the same methods their own parents used on them,” when they were crumb crunchers. “‘It was surprising to see how many parents feel that disciplining their children is ineffective,’ Barkin said… ‘Many are using the same techniques their parents used on them but don’t think they really work.’ The study, based on a survey of parents through community based doctors in 32 U.S. states, Puerto Rico and Canada, found the most common form of discipline was using time-outs, with 45 percent of parents using this method.”
Well, no wonder! Time-outs as a disciplinary measure? The #1 disciplinary measure? No wonder they’re not working! Time-outs? Dawn, what’s a time-out? I know, but what actually is entailed in a time-out? Okay. Okay. Sit there and they can’t play with their music or play with any of their stuff, can’t talk to their friends. Do you make ’em face the corner, or just sit in their room or what have you? So while you’re not in the room watching, they can be doing all that stuff anyway unless you take away the computer and the iPod. Time-out! “It found 41.5 percent of parents removed privileges, while 13 percent reported yelling at their children, and 8.5 percent reported the use of spanking ‘often or always.'” Well! Even better. The one thing that works is the thing that’s tried the least: corporal punishment. Spanking. You know, it’s been said that parents do learn to parent from their own parents. Well, what do we know about baby boomer parents? They sucked! So now kids really have a problem because they’re not being taught how to discipline because they’re not being disciplined.

Time-out? Time-freaking-out?
What’s that? What about one year for every minute? Okay, so if the trouble-making kid is 13, then the time-out is 13 minutes? One year for every year? That’s nothing! I would have craved a time-out under those circumstances. My gosh! Do you know what my punishment was? Cutting the yard, mowing the grass when it was 110 degrees, 105 degrees! That’s when I refused to do it today, because it was all kinds of stuff like that, taking out the trash. Well, that was a daily chore we had to do. But, man. Time-outs? At what age, Dawn, do you stop using time-outs on your kid? Time-outs for five-year-olds, six-year-olds? At nine or ten you stop using the time-outs, and then you really get tough or you say to hell with discipline? It’s probably to hell with the discipline. By nine or ten if they haven’t gotten the message you’ve lost control anyway. They’re grounded? What’s the difference being grounded and time-outs? Grounded! This is not discipline. No wonder these parents think it isn’t working.
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Here’s the last quote from this woman Shari Barkin who did the study on discipline of kids. “Disciplining is something we do daily as parents but if this many parents think it is ineffective, it highlights the need to discuss other ways to teach children how to resolve conflicts.” Is that what discipline is for, to “resolve conflicts”? I thought discipline was to punish people. Discipline is a characteristic, a character trait, a good one. Few people have enough. I know I don’t. It wasn’t a lack of trying, but… Oh, well. The touchy-feelies are slowly taking over out there, folks.
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RUSH: Carl in Cape Coral, Florida, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s great speaking to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I wanted to chime in about the child disciplining. I’ve become the type of person who could see myself putting my child over my knee and lecturing them and spanking, but I have other methods that I use to employ to discipline my children.
RUSH: What do you do, electroshock?
CALLER: That would be nice, but no. One of the things that I noticed worked pretty well is, you know, when you have a kid that’s throwing a tantrum or they just don’t stop singing or they’re screaming and yelling or something like that? I used to have an empty five gallon spackle bucket (a metal pail used to work better, but they’re kind of tough to find), but when the kid doesn’t want to shut up, when they’re throwing a tantrum, you have them put this thing on their head and have them just stand there with it on their head and they just listen to their own voice, and they’re screaming and yelling, reverberate inside that bucket.
RUSH: I like it. It sounds cruel.
CALLER: And they shut up eventually. It just seems to work.
RUSH: I was just kidding.
CALLER: I guess you weren’t kidding about the electroshock, huh?
RUSH: Oh, no, not at all! I was serious about that.
CALLER: (Laughing.)
RUSH: (Laughing.). I hadn’t thought of that. A plastic bucket would work well. So you’ve got the little four-year-old? Would you do this for even like a two-year-old infant that’s just wailing away for no reason?