Rearing your children, right.

Source: "Tasha Henderson got tired of her 14-year-old daughter's poor grades, her chronic lateness to class and her talking back to her teachers, so she decided to teach the girl a lesson.

She made Coretha stand at a busy Oklahoma City intersection Nov. 4 with a cardboard sign that read: "I don't do my homework and I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food....""

"...Donald Wertlieb, a professor of child development at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, warned that such punishment could do extreme emotional damage. He said rewarding positive behavior is more effective.

"The trick is to catch them being good," he said. "It sounds like this mother has not had a chance to catch her child being good or is so upset over seeing her be bad, that's where the focus is." "

Donald must have thought that puppy training book he read was for children. This method of training works with dogs for two reasons. In puppies, they have a short attention span.  If they poop on the floor and you find it an hour later, they will not remember pooping. In other words, they will not associate the punishment with the crime. Human children are not so simple.

Secondly in older dogs, if they do something bad and you punish them by yelling at them, you are still giving them attention and any attention is better than no attention in their minds. While discouraging the bad behavior is good in dogs, you still need to encourage the good behavior, to get desired results.  Again, human children are not so simple.

If you read the rest of the article, the kid ended up turning around and made mamma happy.

I wonder how Donald's kids turned out. If you are going to take finance advice from a person, you are going to want to know if they practice their own advice. It should be no different in the raising of children.

cube