Namaste Publishing

First we had Tiger Mom making the rounds with her extreme views of parenting. Now we have Jessica Beagley, a mom who appeared on the Dr. Phil show with confessions of disciplining her child with hot sauce and cold showers. She admitted that the reason she was on the show was because she had run out of options and wanted to get help. Disturbingly, an informal poll done by the Today Show revealed that 33% of moms felt the hot sauce method of punishment was appropriate.

Ms. Beagley was recently found to be guilty of child abuse. Unfortunately, this was only considered a misdemeanor.

Needless to say, there is an uproar about her case, as there was with the Tiger Mom. Some people are against this approach, and many are for it. Some believe that this is appropriate discipline, and some believe it is unreasonable and excessive.

The mistaken assumption here is that this is a discipline issue.

The truth is it has NOTHING to do with discipline.

What this is instead is emotional dumping.

Pure and simple.

This is what happens when we have unresolved emotional issues from our own past that we project onto our children and then justify our reactivity as being “for their sake.”

If this were a discipline issue, it would be unemotional.

The fact that both Tiger Mom and Ms. Beagley are highly emotional about their approach toward their children demonstrates this has very little to do with the child, and a lot to do with the parents themselves – in other words, their unresolved emotional issues.

It is so easy to think of our approach toward our children as about their behavior, their good or bad behavior. Or we define our reactions toward them as being about their success, their failures, their growth. If we are brutally honest with ourselves, and we parents rarely ever are, we will realize that our reactivity toward them has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with them and all to do with our own lack of emotional integration, and from this our unresolved anxieties about who we are and how we are to relate to others.

The fact is this: We all have unresolved emotional issues within. We all have anxiety. This anxiety leads to a sense of needing control. As a means of controlling this anxiety, we do one of two extremes: check-out or force-in. When we force-in, we yell, scream, punish, hurt, shame, hit, and use other abusive means of control – and we like to call it discipline.

Let’s get real: This is NOT discipline. This is a painful representation of our gross inability to handle our own feelings in the face of our children’s ways of being.

Unless we realize this, the debate will stay at the superficial “good versus bad,” and we will not make the internal shifts that need to be made to bring about true change within ourselves and our children.

The time has come to go deep. Our world is suffering, we are in turmoil, our children are in pain. The time has come to look within ourselves and understand why it is we do what we do.

When our children act-out, are defiant, or are anything other than what we wish them to be, our natural reaction is one of helplessness. This helplessness creates great anxiety within us. It is when we learn to tame our anxiety that we will be able to truly respond to our children as they need us to.

When Ms. Beagley reacts to her child using hot sauce or cold showers, she is not “disciplining” her child. What she is in fact doing is allaying her deep-rooted anxiety of not feeling like she is in control. It is this feeling out of control that is at the root of her reactions, not her child’s defiance.

When Tiger Mom makes her child play the piano until it is perfected without a break for food, water, or other necessities, she fools herself that this is about her child. What she is actually responding to is her own inner anxiety at having imperfection in her life. It is this feeling of anxiety around that which is imperfect that is at the root of her reactions, not her child’s happiness.

Let’s get brutally honest about the power of our unconscious emotionality.

It is only when we take ownership of our deep-rooted and unresolved emotional baggage that we will finally discipline our children as they need us to - with calm dialogue, deep connectivity, and great respect for their spirit.