I’m Not Trying to Raise Obedient Kids

I don't really believe in punishment.

I'm thinking about kids right now, but I suspect it extends beyond that.

When I first had kids, I didn't know what I wanted them to be beyond "happy and healthy," like most parents said back then. As they've gotten older, that's changed. The main thing I want them to be is trustworthy.

Not obedient. Not compliant. Trustworthy.

And that matters more now because we're not really raising little kids anymore. At 15, 15, 14, and 12, we're getting into the part where we're preparing young adults to function without us. And the older we all get, the more I'm realizing that that's the whole job: raising people who don't need us to tell them what to do.

Which makes me think differently about punishment.

What are we actually training them for?

Recently online and in real conversations I've heard versions of, "They'd never get away with that at a job," in reaction to things kids of various ages do.

And I agree with the point. Kids need to learn to be reliable. They need to understand that deadlines matter, that people depend on them, and that their actions affect other people. They need to know that they are a part of a society and a community and hopefully they'll act accordingly.

But another part of my brain immediately goes: Do we really want our kids to be that automatically compliant with an employer?

I don't.

I want kids with the judgement to recognize injustice and inequity and, hopefully, call it out. I want them to understand that an employer can be wrong. A teacher can be wrong. A cop can be wrong. A government can be wrong.

And a parent can be wrong.

I don't think compliance through punishment fosters that... I can't teach them to oppose tyranny while acting like a tyrant.

That doesn't mean I won't make decisions on their behalf that they don't like. I absolutely will. Some decisions require a level of maturity, experience, or information they just don't have yet. That's part of being a parent.

But I think I should be able to explain why.

Adults break rules all the time. We speed. We jaywalk. We walk past the no-trespassing sign because there's something cool on the other side. We share streaming passwords. We pocket cash we know full well we're supposed to record for taxes. We buy something for an event knowing there's a pretty good chance they're going to return it afterward.

I'm not arguing that any of those things are good. I'm saying that I recognize in myself and others a tendency to expect strict adherence to rules by our kids while we regularly flaunt them.

If we don't agree rules, we evaluate them. We decide which ones make sense, and we weigh the risk versus the reward. In short, we're making judgments and acting accordingly.

I don't think we can demand a fundamentally different relationship with rules from our kids just because we're the people with the ability to punish them.

That doesn't mean kids and adults should always have the same rules.

For a long time, we didn't let the kids use screens in the car. No phones, computers, tablets. As they've gotten older, we've relaxed that some, but we still keep it to a minimum and encourage them to engage with each other, read books, and take in the scenery.

Meanwhile, we use ours more than they do while also working to set the example we're prescribing to them by having conversations with each other and with them.

That's unequal, but there's a reason for it. We already know where we're going and how to get there. They don't have the same mental map yet, and we want them to develop one. We want them to notice landmarks on familiar routes, recognize when something changes, and have some idea where they are without being completely dependent on GPS, especially the ones with permits, but anyone can get lost so situational awareness is important.

They don't have to agree with us that this matters. But I think we should be able to give them an explanation that's better than, "Because I said so."

Unequal treatment isn't necessarily unjust.

• Sometimes it's based on developmental differences.
• Sometimes it's about safety concerns.
• Sometimes it's because the people involved have different roles and responsibilities.

But authority should have a reason beyond the fact that I have enough power to enforce it. That's where demagogues come from.

And punishment is maybe the clearest place where that power shows up.

Punishment puts a price on behavior

Punishment is about retribution. The intent is to leave the other person worse off than they were before, even if only for a time, to teach them a lesson that they'd "better not do that again."

The point is to deliver enough pain that they decide the thing isn't worth doing again, whether they actually understand the problem or agree with the rule or not.

And punishment can work. I won't pretend otherwise. People avoid things that hurt.

But I think that ultimately, punishment is transactional, escalatory, and antisocial.

Once an action results in punishment, we've effectively put a price on it. If the desire to do the thing remains, the question isn't "Should I do this?" but "Is it worth the cost?"

If the consequence is: Take a phone away for a week, a week without a phone becomes the price for the action.

If it happens again, maybe it's two weeks. Then four. Then six. Then two months. At some point, the lesson stops being "I shouldn't do this," and becomes, "I can handle two weeks, but whatever I do had better be worth it, because I don't want four."

That can absolutely modify behavior, but behavior modification isn't necessarily the same thing as addressing the problem. And if the underlying desire or issue is still there, punishment can start creating new problems around it.

A kid does something they're not supposed to do and gets punished. Maybe they're less likely to do it again, but maybe they're also more afraid of us finding out. So they start avoiding us. We take see their avoidance and suspect they're hiding things, which makes us trust them less, so we monitor them more closely. They feel watched, so they tell us less. We trust them even less.

This has two potential negative outcomes:

1. They're doing the right thing, but feel so under the microscope that they don't see a path back to trust and do the thing anyway as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: "If you think I'm doing it, I may aw well do it."
2. They deal with one week and realize they can take it, so they do something that gets them two weeks. They do it again and get two weeks. After two weeks, a month doesn't seem so daunting... it doesn't solve the problem.

Now the punishment gets harsher, the surveillance gets tighter, and everybody involved gets better at being adversaries.

We've solved one problem by creating five worse ones.

That keeps bringing me back to one of the core ideas in Phycomycism: better problems.

The question isn't just whether a solution works. It's what problems the solution leaves behind.

Punishment might reduce a behavior while damaging the relationship that would allow us to deal with whatever happens next.

And whatever happens next is kind of the point.

Kids are going to screw up and make bad decisions.

So are adults.

Consequences aren't always consequences

For a while, parenting language seemed to recognize some of this and shifted away from talking about punishment and toward "consequences."

But most of the time, we just changed the noun.

Instead of:

"Your punishment is being grounded for a week."

we got:

"Your consequence is being grounded for a week."

Gentler language. Same machinery.

Then came logical consequences.

If you skip a chore, maybe losing your phone doesn't make sense because the phone has nothing to do with the chore. So the response should somehow connect to what actually happened.

That makes more sense, and I think logical consequences paired with actual conversations can work really well, especially with younger kids. But at some point kids get old enough to notice when the consequence is manufactured.

And even a perfectly "logical" consequence can still just be punishment if the real goal is to make them uncomfortable enough that they won't do it again.

I think I'm trying to get at something slightly different.

Relational consequences.

At the heart of most issues we run into with our kids... or with anyone in society really, comes down to whether we can trust each other.

That doesn't mean we have to tell each other everything. Privacy exists, boundaries exist, and withholding something isn't automatically dishonest.

Trust isn't total access. It's the ability to reasonably rely on each other.

The actual consequence is often trust

A recent example is my daughter riding her bike with a friend.

They'll ride to a park and hike from there to the lake. A few times recently I gave her a time to be home, checked her location around the time she should have been coming around the corner, and saw that she was still at the lake, a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from her bike and another ten- or fifteen-minute ride home.

Twice she came home more than twenty minutes late. Twice she said she thought I'd told her a different time.

I don't like to assume lying. Maybe she did.

But even if the time she said had been right, she still wasn't in a position to be home by then, so we concluded that was a moot point. She still wasn't paying attention to the time.

So we talked about it.

Being a few minutes late isn't always a big deal, especially if you communicate beforehand. But sometimes there is a hard time for a reason, and if I tell you I need you home at a certain time, I need to be able to trust that you're going to manage your time well enough to get there.

She has the tools. She has a phone. She can figure out how long the ride takes, how long the walk takes, and when she needs to leave. She can set an alarm when I give her the time so she doesn't lose track of time and we're using the same time as the expectation.

So I told her that if it keeps happening, she won't be able to go out before important things where I need her home at a specific time.

Superficially, that sounds a lot like a threat of punishment dressed up as a logical consequence.

But I think the difference is in why.

I'm not saying, "You came home late, so now I'm taking something you enjoy away from you."

I'm saying:

"This particular freedom requires me to trust that you can get yourself home when I need you home. If I can't trust that yet, then I can't give you that freedom in situations where timing matters."

The restriction isn't there to hurt.

It's there because the freedom she wants depends on actions that have become uncertain. So, for a while, all rides like that will be treated with stricter timelines so that we can have an established baseline for trust.

And since then, she's been home on time. And after a few more times, she'll have more freedom and less oversight again.

That same applies to something more serious, like misuse of a phone.

If a kid is doing something they shouldn't with their phone, they may lose access to it for a while. From the outside, that looks exactly like punishment.

But again, the reason matters.

I have framed it as:

"We're not taking the phone because you've earned three days of misery. We're taking it because right now we don't trust what's happening on it. We need time to look through things, figure out what happened, make sure everything is safe, and understand what we're actually dealing with."

Depending on the problem, that's taken as little as an hour and as much as a week.

Then, the phone goes back. But, usually with more restrictions, more permissions, and more checking. And as we see responsible use, the restrictions loosen.

The purpose isn't to cause enough pain that you never do it again.

The purpose is to restore enough trust that the freedom makes sense again.

Trust doesn't reset when the timer runs out

The thing that makes this hard is that trust isn't binary.

It isn't there one day, gone the next, and magically restored when the punishment timer runs out.

Some breaches leave residue.

If I discover that you had another device hidden somewhere, I may always wonder a little whether there's another one. I'll hope there isn't, and I'll try to treat you like there isn't, but I'll never feel like I completely know in the same way I did before.

And each time the same trust breaks, it becomes a little more fragile.

I've told my kids some version of this many times:

I can't imagine anything you could do that would make me stop loving you. But I could stop trusting you. Please do your part to make sure we never get there.

That, to me, is the heart of the distinction.

Punishment says:

"You broke the rules. Now pay the price."

Relational consequences say:

"Something changed because of what happened. Let's figure out what it takes to rebuild it."

Sometimes that still means losing access to something. It might means less freedom or more supervision for their safety. It might mean stricture adherence to rules to demonstrate responsibility for a while. It's not that discomfort doesn't happen, it's that discomfort isn't the point.

But sometimes the relationship that needs repairing isn't the relationship with the parent.

If they steal something, break something on purpose or because of negligence, bully someone, lie about somebody, or otherwise hurt another person, then that person is part of the consequence too.

They may need to replace what was broken, correct the lie, apologize, repair what they can, and accept that the person you hurt may not immediately trust you again, or ever, just because you've said you're sorry.

That's not punishment.

That's dealing with what your action actually did.

Safety isn't punishment

The same thing applies when a kid does something dangerous.

If anything, that's when I want to get to the heart of the problem even more.

If I don't trust them to drive safely, I'm taking the keys. If something dangerous is happening through their phone, I'm taking the phone. If I don't think they can safely go somewhere, they aren't going.

Those decisions can be immediate, unilateral, and extremely unpopular.

But that doesn't make them punishment. And if you've built meaningful trust in both directions, they will recognize that sooner as well.

I'm not trying to make them suffer, I'm responding to the fact that I no longer trust the situation enough to responsibly allow it to continue.

That's a meaningful distinction.

The restriction should answer the problem.

Punishment is easier

The hard part is that punishment is easier.

It gives us a clean sequence:

1. Rule.
2. Violation.
3. Sentence.
4. Done.

It also gives us visible evidence that something happened. The kid did something wrong, and now they're unhappy.

Justice has occurred. But has anything changed? Recidivism rates are pretty high in America... so, at a societal level it would seem that justice like that doesn't typically create change. But that's another article entirely.

Anyway, relational consequences are messier. They depend on:

• What happened
• Why it happened
• The person involved
• Their age
• Their maturity
• Whether it's happened before
• Whether someone was harmed
• What we know
• What we don't know.

There isn't a chart where lying equals three days without a phone.

And that's frustrating, but human relationships aren't Hammurabi's codes.

It can also feel like we're letting kids get away with something we never would have gotten away with.

We can't imagine rewarding bad behavior. It feels like we're giving something up.

And we are. Our power.

Our authority.

But giving some of that up is part of the job.

Parents are kind of their first government

Eventually, if everything goes reasonably well, we will lose all legal authority anyway. At a certain point, their view of us as an authority is their decision based on whether we've earned that.

My kids will become adults. They'll have jobs, relationships, families, neighbors, governments, institutions, people with power over them, and people over whom they have some power.

I want them to be reliable people who show up when they say they will, who understand that other people depend on them, and I want them to take responsibility when they screw up and be generous when other screw up.

But I also want them to know when a rule is stupid.

I want them to notice when somebody is being treated unfairly or when an employer is exploiting people, or when an institution is wrong, or when authority has crossed the line from legitimate responsibility into domination.

I want them to be able to question power with nuance and grace and good judgement, but without automatically rejecting responsibility for themselves or their position.

And I don't know how I teach that if their first and primary experience with authority is someone saying:

"Do what I tell you or I'll make your life unpleasant."

Parents are their first government. The home is their first society.

And we're an absurdly powerful one.

We control money, transportation, screens, schedules, food, where they live, where they go, and a thousand other things. Sometimes we have to use that power.

But having the power doesn't automatically make the way we use it legitimate.

If I want my kids to eventually distinguish between legitimate authority and someone simply having power over them, then I have to try to make that distinction visible while I'm the one holding most of the power.

That means sometimes saying no.

It means sometimes overruling them.

It means sometimes making decisions they vehemently disagree with.

But I think I owe them more than:

"Because I can."

Better problems

I'm not trying to raise kids who never break rules.

That seems both impossible and hypocritical.

I'm not even sure I'm trying to raise kids who always make the right decision, because I certainly don't. But I want them to work on being better and learning lessons.

I'm trying to raise people who can make decisions, understand consequences, recognize when they've hurt someone, repair relationships, handle increasing freedom, question bad rules, accept justified limits, and be trusted.

That leaves us with harder problems.

Instead of asking:

"How much punishment will finally make this kid stop?"

we end up asking things like:

• Why did this happen?
• Can I trust you?
• What actually changed?
• What freedom makes sense right now?
• What do you need from me?
• What do I need from you?
• How do we get back to where we were?

Those questions are frustrating. They take longer. They don't give us the immediate satisfaction of handing down a sentence and knowing that justice has apparently occurred because somebody is now miserable.

But Phycomycism doesn't promise a world without problems.

The goal is better problems.

And I'd rather have the problem of figuring out how much trust and freedom make sense than the problem of figuring out how much pain it takes to make someone comply.

Go in balance. Stay connected. And be a fun guy 🍄