Minimum Necessary Force

Here's a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws.

This is the ethical—even legal—equivalent of Occam's razor, the scientist's conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable. So, don't encumber children—or their disciplinarians—with too many rules. That path leads to frustration.

Limit the rules. Then, figure out what to do when one of them gets broken. A general, context-independent rule for punishment severity is hard to establish.

However, a helpful norm has already been enshrined in English common law, one of the great products of Western civilization. Its analysis can help us establish a second useful principle.

English common law allows you to defend your rights, but only in a reasonable manner. Someone breaks into your house. You have a loaded pistol. You have a right to defend yourself, but it's better to do it in stages.

What if it's a drunk and confused neighbour? "Shoot 'em!" you think. But it's not that simple. So, you say, instead, "Stop! I have a gun." If that produces neither explanation nor retreat, you might consider a warning shot.

Then, if the perpetrator still advances, you might take aim at his leg. (Don't mistake any of this for legal advice. It's an example.) A single brilliantly practical principle can be used to generate all these incrementally more severe reactions: that of minimum necessary force. So now we have two general principles of discipline.

The first: limit the rules.

The second: Use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.

About the first principle, you might ask, "Limit the rules to what, exactly?" Here are some suggestions. Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defence. Do not torture and bully other children, so you don't end up in jail.

Eat in a civilized and thankful manner, so that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you.

Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don't hate you and might therefore deign to teach you something. Go to sleep properly, and peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not resent your existence.

Take care of your belongings, because you need to learn how and because you're lucky to have them.

Be good company when something fun is happening, so that you're invited for the fun. Act so that other people are happy you're around, so that people will want you around.

A child who knows these rules will be welcome everywhere.

About the second, equally important principle, your question might be: What is minimum necessary force?

This must be established experimentally, starting with the smallest possible intervention. Some children will be turned to stone by a glare.

A verbal command will stop another.

A thumb-cocked flick of the index finger on a small hand might be necessary for some.

Such a strategy is particularly useful in public places such as restaurants. It can be administered suddenly, quietly and effectively, without risking escalation. What's the alternative?

A child who is crying angrily, demanding attention, is not making himself popular.

A child who is running from table to table and disrupting everyone's peace is bringing disgrace (an old word, but a good one) on himself and his parents.

Such outcomes are far from optimal, and children will definitely misbehave more in public, because they are experimenting: trying to establish if the same old rules also apply in the new place. They don't sort that out verbally, not when they are under three.

When our children were little and we took them to restaurants, they attracted smiles. They sat nicely and ate politely.

They couldn't keep it up for long, but we didn't keep them there too long. When they started to get antsy, after sitting for forty-five minutes, we knew it was time to go. That was part of the deal. Nearby diners would tell us how nice it was to see a happy family.

We weren't always happy, and our children weren't always properly behaved. But they were most of the time, and it was wonderful to see people responding so positively to their presence. It was truly good for the kids.

They could see that people liked them. This also reinforced their good behaviour. That was the reward.

People will really like your kids if you give them the chance. This is something I learned as soon as we had our first baby, our daughter, Mikhaila. When we took her down the street in her little foldup stroller in our French Montreal working-class neighbourhood, rough-looking heavy-drinking lumberjack types would stop in their tracks and smile at her.

They would coo and giggle and make stupid faces. Watching people respond to children restores your faith in human nature. All that's multiplied when your kids behave in public.

To ensure that such things happen, you have to discipline your children carefully and effectively—and to do that, you have to know something about reward, and about punishment, instead of shying away from the knowledge.

Part of establishing a relationship with your son or daughter is learning how that small person responds to disciplinary intervention—and then intervening effectively. It's very easy to mouth clichés instead, such as: "There is no excuse for physical punishment," or, "Hitting children merely teaches them to hit."

Let's start with the former claim: there is no excuse for physical punishment. First, we should note the widespread consensus around the idea that some forms of misbehavior, particularly those associated with theft and assault, are both wrong and should be subject to sanction.

Second, we should note that almost all those sanctions involve punishment in its many psychological and more directly physical forms.

Deprivation of liberty causes pain in a manner essentially similar to that of physical trauma. The same can be said of the use of social isolation (including time out). We know this neurobiologically.

The same brain areas mediate response to all three, and all are ameliorated by the same class of drugs, opiates. Jail is clearly physical punishment—particularly solitary confinement—even when nothing violent happens.

Third, we should note that some misbegotten actions must be brought to a halt both effectively and immediately, not least so that something worse doesn't happen.

What's the proper punishment for someone who will not stop poking a fork into an electrical socket?

Or who runs away laughing in a crowded supermarket parking lot?

The answer is simple: whatever will stop it fastest, within reason. Because the alternative could be fatal.

That's pretty obvious, in the case of parking lot or outlet. But the same thing applies in the social realm, and that brings us to the fourth point regarding excuses for physical punishment.

The penalties for misbehavior (of the sort that could have been effectively halted in childhood) become increasingly severe as children get older—and it is disproportionately those who remain unsocialized effectively by age four who end up punished explicitly by society in their later youth and early adulthood.

Those unconstrained four-year-olds, in turn, are often those who were unduly aggressive, by nature, at age two. They were statistically more likely than their peers to kick, hit, bite and take away toys (later known as stealing). They comprise about five per cent of boys, and a much smaller percentage of girls.

To unthinkingly parrot the magic line "There is no excuse for physical punishment" is also to foster the delusion that teenage devils magically emerge from once-innocent little child-angels.

You're not doing your child any favors by overlooking any misbehavior (particularly if he or she is temperamentally more aggressive).

To hold the no excuse for physical punishment theory is also (fifth) to assume that the word no can be effectively uttered to another person in the absence of the threat of punishment.

A woman can say no to a powerful, narcissistic man only because she has social norms, the law and the state backing her up.

A parent can only say no to a child who wants a third piece of cake because he or she is larger, stronger and more capable than the child (and is additionally backed up in his authority by law and state).

What no means, in the final analysis, is always "If you continue to do that, something you do not like will happen to you." Otherwise it means nothing.

Or, worse, it means "another nonsensical nothing muttered by ignorable adults."

Or, worse still, it means, "all adults are ineffectual and weak." This is a particularly bad lesson, when every child's destiny is to become an adult, and when most things that are learned without undue personal pain are modelled or explicitly taught by adults).

What does a child who ignores adults and holds them in contempt have to look forward to?

Why grow up at all?

And that's the story of Peter Pan, who thinks all adults are variants of Captain Hook, tyrannical and terrified of his own mortality (think hungry crocodile with clock in his stomach). The only time no ever means no in the absence of violence is when it is uttered by one civilized person to another.

And what about the idea that hitting a child merely teaches them to hit? First: No. Wrong. Too simple. For starters, "hitting" is a very unsophisticated word to describe the disciplinary act of an effective parent.

If "hitting" accurately described the entire range of physical force, then there would be no difference between rain droplets and atom bombs.

Magnitude matters— and so does context, if we're not being wilfully blind and naïve about the issue. Every child knows the difference between being bitten by a mean, unprovoked dog and being nipped by his own pet when he tries playfully but too carelessly to take its bone. How hard someone is hit, and why they are hit, cannot merely be ignored when speaking of hitting.

Timing, part of context, is also of crucial importance. If you flick your two-year-old with your finger just after he smacks the baby on the head with a wooden block, he will get the connection, and be at least somewhat less willing to smack her again in the future.

That seems like a good outcome. He certainly won't conclude that he should hit her more, using the flick of his mother's finger as an example. He's not stupid. He's just jealous, impulsive and not very sophisticated.

And how else are you going to protect his younger sibling? If you discipline ineffectively, then the baby will suffer. Maybe for years. The bullying will continue, because you won't do a damn thing to stop it.

You'll avoid the conflict that's necessary to establish peace.

You'll turn a blind eye. And then later, when the younger child confronts you (maybe even in adulthood), you'll say, "I never knew it was like that." You just didn't want to know. So, you didn't.

You just rejected the responsibility of discipline, and justified it with a continual show of your niceness. Every gingerbread house has a witch inside it that devours children.

So where does all that leave us? With the decision to discipline effectively, or to discipline ineffectively (but never the decision to forego discipline altogether, because nature and society will punish in a draconian manner whatever errors of childhood behavior remain uncorrected).

So here are a few practical hints: time out can be an extremely effective form of punishment, particularly if the misbehaving child is welcome as soon as he controls his temper. An angry child should sit by himself until he calms down.

Then he should be allowed to return to normal life. That means the child wins— instead of his anger. The rule is "Come be with us as soon as you can behave properly." This is a very good deal for child, parent and society.

You'll be able to tell if your child has really regained control.

You'll like him again, despite his earlier misbehaviour.

If you're still mad, maybe he hasn't completely repented—or maybe you should do something about your tendency to hold a grudge.

If your child is the kind of determined varmint who simply runs away, laughing, when placed on the steps or in his room, physical restraint might have to be added to the time out routine.

A child can be held carefully but firmly by the upper arms, until he or she stops squirming and pays attention. If that fails, being turned over a parent's knee might be required.

For the child who is pushing the limits in a spectacularly inspired way, a swat across the backside can indicate requisite seriousness on the part of a responsible adult.

There are some situations in which even that will not suffice, partly because some children are very determined, exploratory, and tough, or because the offending behaviour is truly severe. And if you're not thinking such things through, then you're not acting responsibly as a parent.

You're leaving the dirty work to someone else, who will be much dirtier doing it.