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Raising Generations
Does Your Discipline Style Affect Your Grandchildren? By Kim Byrum Skinner
Miriam Harris breaks into a grin as she ventures back four decades, describing a time when no-nonsense moms and dads meant what they said, when rules were strictly enforced and parenting wasn't a popularity contest.
It was the 1940s, and her oldest son, Terry, was usually in Mom's or Dad's doghouse. The reasons, of course, varied.
"He was weeks washing dishes, and he hated that," says Harris, a spry, 89-year-old widow. "We didn't have a dishwasher back then, so he was forever washing dishes. Once he got older and had a car, if he did anything wrong, his father stuck out his hand for the keys."
Despite a more authoritarian, "Father Knows Best" approach, this Middleburg, Fla., resident doesn't consider her generation's brand of old-school discipline strict. Kids understood who was in charge, she says.
"We talked with both of our kids quite a bit, and were always involved in their school activities skating parties, sock hops," she says. "It wasn't a dictatorship. It can't be. You have to learn to give and take, to a certain extent. We never gave in; we just stuck to it. If one of us said something, we stuck with it. If anything came up, we'd talk about it with each other first. If I thought my husband punished the kids wrong, I'd talk to him later. We never talked about it in front of them. We never gave them an opportunity to go from one to the other to play one off the other."
"We discourage parents from being at either extreme," says Kirk Bloir, extension associate with Ohio State University's College of Human Ecology, department of human development and family sciences. "Being overly controlling is not healthy for youth development. You end up having kids who are resentful of authority mistrusting of authority figures because so many rules were imposed on them, or the rules were so harsh that they frequently weren't able to live up to them."