[Elissetecausa]

is discipline just another way of controlling people? i would say yes.

there is a difference between punishment and communication. with young children who do not have the full use of their logical faculties, sometimes you do something physical to communicate to them. you put them in their room, or ground them, or whatever. you are instituting some kind of control and the idea is to communicate that you don't want them to do it.

so what if they hear your communication and keep disobeying? do you now escalate? do you start with yelling at them, escalate to shaming them, escalate to removing support, escalate to throwing them out, escalate to beating them, escalate to murder?

all of these behaviors are on the negative path towards control. you have moved into the realm of punishment and control rather than love and communication.

to begin with, a 17 year old is obviously old enough to make his own choices. children are realistically able to run their own lives after puberty. sure, they may be what society calls "immature" and they may do stupid things, but that is a major part of life. they do not benefit by having some authority figure shadow them, and then every time they make a mistake the authority figure dumps on a bunch of extra challenges and suffering.

the role of a parent is not to control or dominate. it is not to force. it is to nurture, but not smother - this means that the child chooses when to be nurtured. you cannot force someone to be nurtured. you can't say to your son, "if you don't let me nurture you, i will beat you to death!"

it doesn't work. it makes no sense. yet this is what many many parents try to do, this is what society in general teaches parents to do. it teaches to punish and to maim and to harm and to threaten and to use leverage and take control.

this is all negative, old-world, patriarchal thinking.

new world, positive thinking is about being available for the child when they come to you.

your son has decided that sometimes it's better to sleep in a bit than to go to school immediately. he is a living, breathing, thinking, human being, and i'm told he is pretty smart. why do you expect him to agree with your judgments on everything? it is inevitable that there will be times you disagree about things. your role as a parent is not to create a carbon copy of yourself, you are not raising a clone, you are not molding a sculpture. you are providing love and genetic material and physical safety, and your child is using these raw materials to create his own sculpture to *his* specifications. not yours.

he is certainly grateful that you provide him with many raw materials, but just because you are funding the project doesn't mean you have creative control. you don't. it's his baby, even if he is your baby.

you will disagree on things. if you choose to then enforce your will upon him using various tactics of manipulation and control, you are following the negative path.

if you choose to accept his choices (even if you disagree with them) and to nurture him in whatever path he freely chooses, you are following the positive path.

when you spray a cat with a squirt gun, you aren't doing it to manipulate him. you are doing it for communication. you don't need to use a squirt gun on a 17 year old, he speaks english. and he understands english. and he has god-given free will, and he may use it to ignore you.

are you going to try to take away the free will that god gave him and subject him to your free will instead?

love, communication, acceptance... please don't expect your children to behave in the way you want them to. they never have at any point in history, and never will. why? because they are not you, they are a different person with different tastes.

let me tell you about my own life. oftentimes throughout my childhood something bad will have happened to me. maybe i failed a class, maybe i was behaving irresponsibly with respect to work, whatever.

these things weren't the fault of my parents. they were entirely my issues, and part of me growing was learning to deal with these issues.

so let's say i fail a class because i'm acting irresponsibly. my fault, and i feel terrible shame because of it. i think it was really stupid of me to behave the way i did, and of course i knew before i failed that i would. i knew it would happen, i was being stupid. i was making mistakes, being hedonistic, putting off homework, whatever. and then i fail, and now added to the initial problem that was causing me to fail in the first place, i have a bunch of shame and feelings of inadequacy. it's very embarrassing. my mom's approach to dealing with this was to punish me in every way she could think of. shaming me, insulting me, accusing me of having negative intentions. she would tell my extended family and i would feel all kinds of anxiety and shame in facing my family at family greetings because of this. i would have my extended family now on me too - they also shaming me and scolding me for stuff i didn't even know they knew about.

basically i was in a rough spot in my life, and my mom's approach was to make it even harder on me. i fell into a pile of **** and my mom said, "i know what will help! i'll dump more **** on your head!"

a kid is drowning and instead of throwing him a liferaft you start threatening him. "don't you dare drown or you'll be sorry!"

so you know those raw materials i talked about? love, money, genetic material that parents give to their kids? when i failed a class my mom's approach was to threaten me with the removal of these. now that i failed, she tells me if i fail anymore classes she will remove her monetary support. (this was at university) and she had already removed her "love" support because i learned early on that love and grades go together. no love without high marks.

it's ridiculous isn't it? but in the mind of my mom, she is doing these things out of love, and she honestly believes to this day that these tactics were helping me.

so after being threatened with the removal of monetary support i am supposed to continue my life, but now i'm terrified of all kinds of things. my anxiety grows, my shame grows, i'm terrified while taking classes because all i can think of is what will happen to me if i fail again, if i act irresponsibly. meanwhile, the original problem i was having that caused my initial failure is going unaddressed because i am having all these new problems dumped on me.

my mom seriously believed (and still does) that if she did not (and does not, because it never ends no matter how old i am) harm me or threaten me, that i would just go throw my life away. she seems to think that the purpose of my life is to avoid her punishment and without her punishment i would have no reason to live.

so anyway you may say this is an extreme example, and i suppose it is, i would probably kill to have a mother like you. but why are you going to take any plays out of the playbook of a mother like mine?

if your son stays up too late (makes a mistake) and then makes the judgment that it's better for him to sleep an extra 30 than to spend the whole day tired, are you helping by arguing with him and trying to manipulate him?

maybe the right thing to do is make him coffee and wish him a nice day?