If we know that effects of our consequences-cum –punishments cause harm to our children, why do we do it? We must have a higher cause of some kind that encourages us to do so. It's in our language in many ways: "This hurts me more than it hurts you—I am doing this to you for your own good" and the like. We feel the tension created by our acts toward our child, and yet we go ahead against not only our best judgment but our best instinct and intuition. Generally, people tell me they feel terrible after punishing their child. Of course, they often exclude the word "punishing" and use the word "disciplining." They also say it as an internal imperative, a demand to the self: "I had to discipline Frances this morning." They say it with a combination of determination, sadness, and regret. We might even sense some little resentment toward the child because if we had to punish little Frances; it happened because she made it happen through her conduct. All this gets very complex because we actually know intuitively that what we do in punishing hurts the child, and it hurts us as well.
We do it anyway—because we must. The unquestioned "must" has to come from somewhere. If it speaks to us as a "must," an incorrigible truth and demand, it speaks as a meaning perspective. We have not questioned or critically reflected on that essential form of truth even though empirically it makes everyone involved feel terrible. It comes from learning from our own parental figures. We learned it from them even when we were on the wrong end, when we were the child in question, the child on trial.
Many of us can remember our parental figure finding fault in us in some way. We might not have really understood the way in which we were at fault or why that thing was bad enough for what happens as a result. When the parental figure looms over us and does the discipline dance of one kind or another, we say to ourselves, "When I grow up, I will never do this to my child." Given how we feel at the moment, we really mean it.
Time moves forward, and we become the parental figure looming over our child whom we see as having breached in some way. What are we doing? The same thing as was done to us. Why do it now when we didn't like it then? As a child we often hear, "you'll understand this when you grow up." Do we? We repeat the pat phrases that try to explain the thing away. We act but don't know. That's why we act. We become our parental and punish. As an adult we feel we have to do something, and when we look into our ways of seeing the world and acting in the world, the only image we have is our parental figure. We act as a parental figure in the way that we have seen and experienced from our own parental figure because it's the only way we know how to act. And we have to do something. It's a meaning perspective that drives us to do what we do and punish even when we feel deeply troubled by it. Many people have told me that the child goes away crying after a punishment or part of the punishment, and they go away crying as well. Whatever else we learned from our parents punishing us, we learned how to punish our own children and that we have to do so.[13]
Although many if not all of us find ourselves distorted by the idea and the act of punishing the child in our intimate care, we do it anyway. Our emotional sense of well being feels violated when we remove our unconditional positive regard from the child who trusts us to offer that care. When we remove that emotional tie from this needy young being, we must do something emotionally to ourselves as well. By changing our natural desire to offer unconditional positive regard, we distort some natural emotional response we feel to the vulnerable child and thus to ourselves. We need to change our self and our way of perceiving in order to act in a way contrary to our essential feelings.[14]
In that sense, we allow our intellectual self, driven by a parental meaning perspective, to dominate our natural emotional self. When we do that, we become driven by what this meaning perspective tells us to see as a higher, rationalist cause. Once we reach this rationalist state, we can overcome any negative emotional response we feel about inflicting pain on the young person in our care who trusts us to offer them the best the world has to offer. We can violate that child's desire for a fulfilled optimism and violate our own desire to offer them that fulfillment. We make ourselves feel justified in punishing the child in our care in order to discipline that child. Whatever name we want to use to rationalize our treatment of this vulnerable being, when we remove unconditional positive regard, we punish.
The parental meaning perspective tells us that we must teach our child discipline. In order to teach discipline to our child, we have to discipline the child for anything we feel violates our standard of conduct—even when we violate that standard ourselves on a regular basis. We do so even when that standard may appear and feel quite arbitrary and impossible to decode for the child because the standard can feel extremely erratic and uncertain.
Most of my students could remember a shift in parental standards that resulted in punishment. It can work like this. As a very young child, we develop a trick that delights everyone around, especially a parental figure. Whenever we want to get some happy attention, positive regard, we do the trick and it works. It maybe a funny face or a funny noise or both simultaneously, but it never fails to get a laugh and some regard. We get older and older, and one day we walk into the kitchen seeking some regard, and we do the trick. Our parental figure turns to us as says, "When are you going to grow up and stop making those stupid faces and making that stupid noise? Why can't you act your age?" As a child, we have no idea what happened, what motivated this incredible shift from positive regard to negative regard, but we feel it down to our shoes.
My niece grew very early, and at twelve, she was taller than I was at 5'10". She was also built quite heavily. She also felt like a very playful twelve year old. When she manifested this playfulness, she often heard some say, "Please act your age." She was acting her age. She wasn’t acting her size. The instruction felt like rejection. It hurt. She and I talked it over, and she understood, but the understanding did not heal the pain. It explained it, but it still hurt.
Rejection hurts no matter the intention.