‘Adolescents do not rebel against their parents, they rebel against their power.’

And they run out of power sooner than they think!

This was an amusing post on social media:

‘My daughter had a timeout this morning.

Husband said, “Alexa. Set timer for 1 minute.”

Toddler said, “Alexa. Turn it off.”

This doesn’t bode well for adolescence.’

But it raises an important issue - what are the consequences in later years of using rewards and punishment, such as 'timeout', to control children when they are little?

Here’s a page on the subject, from the book Parent Effectiveness Training, written by psychologist Thomas Gordon - P.E.T. presents an alternative to using rewards and punishment.

The Teen Years

I am now convinced that most theories about the ‘stress and strains of adolescence’ have focused incorrectly on such factors as adolescents’ physical changes, their emerging sexuality, their new social demands, their struggle between being a child and an adult, and so on. This period is difficult for children and parents largely because adolescents become so independent of their parents that they can no longer be easily controlled by rewards and punishments. And since most parents rely so heavily on rewards and punishment, adolescents react with much independent resistive, rebellious and hostile behaviour.

Parents assume that adolescent rebellion and hostility are inevitably a function of this stage of development. I think this is not valid - it is more that adolescents become more able to resist and rebel. They are no longer controlled by their parents’ rewards because they don’t need them so much and they are immune to threats of punishment because there is little parents can do to give them pain or strong discomfort. The typical adolescent behaves as she does because she has acquired enough strength and resources to satisfy her own needs and enough of her own power so that she need not fear the power of her parents.

An adolescent, therefore, does not rebel against her parents. She rebels against their power. If parents would rely less on power and more on non-power methods to influence their children from infancy on, there would be little for children to rebel against when they become adolescents. The use of power to change the behaviour of children, then, has this severe limitation: parents inevitably run out of power, and sooner than they think.