It's Never Ok to Discipline Someone Else's Child, with parents present
Recently Grazia Magazine contacted me asking for my comments about a video on TikTok which went viral after a couple threatened to discipline someone else’s child on a flight in the USA. The three year old child reportedly turned around and blew raspberries on them, thus showering them with spit and was generally behaving poorly. In a follow-up video, the passenger sitting behind the child revealed that after the third incident her husband very sternly said to the parents
” if you don’t get your kid under control I’ll do it for you.”
In this scenario of a child-stranger situation, but with the parents present, it’s never ok to discipline some else’s child. Parenting is the hardest job in the world and we get no training. It’s a complex messy tiring role, and judgement and disapproving looks are never helpful.
I had a similar scenario happen to me many years ago on a packed London train, with a passenger berating me and saying what my child needed was a darned good smack! All parents at some point will have experienced what I call the LPM - the Low Parenting Moment- it’s always in a public place with others watching. I recall feeling hopeless, embarrassed and completely out of control. I didn’t know what to do and then out of nowhere, on this packed London train (where so much as engaging eye contact with other passengers is frowned upon), I heard myself making a speech:
“My child is neuro-diverse. I need your support, not judgement. He is not being a problem, but having a problem. As you can see, I am not coping well, but the last thing in the world I am going to do is to smack my child for having a problem. Will you all please stop judging me and will someone help me to leave the train at the next station.”
If you’re interested in what happened next, check out my blog post here " What your boy needs is a darned good smack." | The Parent Practice
Parents across the developed world are beset by guilt about their parenting, and since the pandemic in 2020, it’s never been so acute. Public shaming is humiliating and never effective. Spending our life feeling inadequate and guilty isn’t just exhausting, but it stops us from fulfilling our true potential, both at home, at work and as parents. Our lack of trust in ourselves stops us from putting ourselves forward, from trying new things or from expressing ourselves. And when we operate out of these feelings, we model behaviour for our children that makes it likely those feelings will carry on down the generations.
It's clear in this flight scenario that the parents were trying their best to control the situation, asking her to stop and delivering traditional methods of trying to manage behaviour. Most misbehaviour starts off as a small low level thing such as kicking feet against a chair, but how we react as adults and what we do and say in the moment impacts hugely what happens next. My guess is that in this scenario the child was probably bored; and given her age, she’s hard wired to get attention any way she can. Even negative attention may seem better than no attention.
When faced with misbehaviour the onus is on parents to change the mood. It’s a misaligned strategy when parents focus on pointing out what a child is doing wrong, in order to make them stop
So, what could the parents have done to manage the situation, and the couple who were impacted?
1. Use praise descriptively to prevent poor behaviour starting. When faced with misbehaviour we don’t generally think of praising our children, but the onus is on us as parents to change the mood, the vicious cycle of poor behaviour, then criticism and more misbehaviour. It’s a misaligned strategy when parents focus on pointing out what the child is doing wrong, in order to make them stop. It’s a misconception that by criticising and telling off, we think we’re going to motivate our children to do something different and it just doesn’t work. In this scenario, the more the parents told her to stop and sit down and be calm, the more emotionally dysregulated she became as her self esteem lowered and she became more uncooperative
2. Think about Positive discipline being PROACTIVE not REACTIVE: set things up so the children can get things right, rather than waiting for things to go wrong and then resorting to reprimanding and punishing. Clear consistent rules and boundaries are essential here to help the children know what’s expected of them. In this scenario, the parents could have had a clear rule such as “sit with bottom on seat” and so as she sat there happily following the rule for possibly 80% of the time, she would receive lots of positive affirmation, this motivating her to do the right thing.
3. Reflect on Your child’s agenda being just as important to them as your agenda is to you -engaging with your child and trying to distract them by providing a bit of fun and novelty goes a long way. The child in this flight scenario was probably not being a problem but having a problem - they were clearly bored, so lots of setting up for success was needed to ensure they are occupied and engaged.
4. Empathy goes a long way -if you see parents struggling, a kind empathetic word is always appreciated, and on one flight I observed a stranger offering her sweets to a child who was struggling to stay seated (with the parents’ permission of course). It then quickly became a game of ‘which hand had the strawberry flavour sweet’ and ‘guess the flavour’ and within a few minutes the child had calmed down and was happily engaged.The bottom line is whatever the scenario, all behaviour is a form of communication, and that’s what needs to be addressed first, before correcting any behaviour.
Always connection before correction.
For my comments on this hot topic, do read the Grazia article here, and for more discussion about positive discipline, take a look at my other blog posts on this topic.