Threats Don't Work Long-Term

Do you ever cringe when you hear yourself in your kids’ words?

My kids had an interesting interaction recently, which made me think about the way that we interact with them. And I think you will relate to this if you’ve been using threats to make your kids do things.

One day, my kids were playing with glow-in-the-dark Perler beads. My daughter wanted to explain to my son why the Perler beads glow in the dark. She went into teacher mode and was presenting beautifully. But my son felt like he knew all that my daughter was trying to teach him, so he was being silly and not really paying attention.

Understandably, my daughter was offended. She felt like she had some really good knowledge to impart and the insolence of her brother surely only meant he didn’t understand the value of her teachings. Her first reaction was to double down and become more controlling. She said to her brother, “Be quiet! Imagine that L (their best friend) is explaining to you and you don’t know.” My son was still acting silly. She continued, “No! Your teacher is explaining to you!” After a second, “No! The principal of the school is explaining!! No! The president!!!” All this time getting visibly more and more irritated, impatient, and shouting even louder.

She was escalating, making the threats more frightening and convincing, bringing in bigger authority figures, in order to make her brother listen to her.

And what was her brother’s response? He was simply rolling his eyes and laughing, clearly not impressed by her efforts.

Watching my kids, I began laughing inside, thinking to myself, isn’t this what we do?! We feel so righteous and determined and get really frustrated when our kids don’t see the necessity and importance of whatever it is that we are trying to get them to do. It was funny and embarrassing at the same time to see myself in that interaction.

We are temporarily blinded by the illusion that we can control our kids and force them into doing “the right thing”.

When kids are little, it’s quite easy to scare them into obedience. But as they grow older, our threats have to also grow scarier and more catastrophic to convince them to comply.

And what happens when they are old enough to realize that we’re just bluffing and our tactics stop working? Are we calling in the president to make our child listen?

The truth is that threats and punishments don’t work in the long run. And, in the end, it all backfires.

Because in fact, we have no control over our kids. Whatever they do is because they want to do it. They want to listen to us, they want to cooperate, and they want to follow our lead. And when they don’t want to, they just don’t do it.

It’s important to understand that when we resort to threats, it’s usually because we feel powerless and helpless. We don’t feel like we have the resources and tools to handle the needs of the moment. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Parenting is hard and no one knows what to do all the time.

But we can learn new parenting tools to help us in a variety of parenting situations. And the most effective parenting tool is our relationship with our kids. Whenever they listen to us and follow our lead it’s because they want to. And the reason they want to is that they feel connected to us and they respect us. Threats and punishments erode our relationship. But if we remember to come from a place of love and respect, we honor who our children are and also who we are.