Parents, Discipline, Absolute Rules and Consequences

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Kids have no discipline and need strict rules that need to be obeyed absolutely. Yes, kids do need rules and structure but it can’t be absolute like a number of those in the older generations want. Orders and rules can’t be absolute and here is why.

Before I answer why, I have to answer why do we have rules and structure? Why do we have authority? It is so we can all live in the most ordered way possible. Without rules, we would simply do things to each other for our own gratification like stealing. That’s according to their logic. I do have problems with this sort of thinking but that’s besides the point. What happens when the very rules are detrimental in different contexts?

Here is an example of what happened to me in middle school. I had to use the restroom. I was allowed to use the facility’s restroom. The door knob malfunctioned. I literally could not turn the knob to open the door. I tried calling out for help. No avail. No one could hear me. There was a grating that was attached to the door. I decided to kick it out in spite of the rule that prohibited vandalism. How was I to meet my parents expectations which was to obey the school’s rules? I could not. If I obey my parent’s expectations and the school’s rules I would have still remained stuck in the facility’s bathroom.

Fortunately, logic prevailed and I didn’t get into trouble whatsoever and my parents don’t even know about this to this day. We have zero tolerance laws and rules today. If I did the same thing today that I did back then, would I have gotten into trouble. Looking at different cases, it seems as though I would have does. How was I to obey in this case? How was I supposed to show respect and deference to authority in this case?

Another example, let’s say I have a child (I do not) and my child’s vehicle’s rear differential is messed up and they have to pull over and rightfully so. I don’t realize it is messed up because I’m misunderstanding what my child is saying or something else. I tell the child to drive it home and the child feels he or she is in danger by driving it. I don’t realize this. Maybe I have a brain tumor that is causing me to perceive reality incorrectly. Here is my question. Should this child defer to me no matter what and obey my rules no matter I say even it is detrimental to their well being? Or, should my child choose to disobey me and my rules if it will put their lives in danger and they know it. This is why parental figures, authority types, conservatives and personal responsibility types are DEAD wrong when they say the rules must be obeyed absolutely and 100% and the child must always defer to the parent.

Great description of ethics, and how nearly every rule has an exception. There are those occasions where personal needs really do outweigh 'the needs of the many,' as Spock phrased it. Kids take time to learn these concepts though and might start with absolute, black-and-white morality.

1) I don't know what a rear differential is.
2) A 16 year old is a minor, but not a child. A reasonable person wouldn't expect to control every decision a 16 year old makes, as at that age the minor is preparing for eventual independence.
3) If the school story happened today, the school could be held liable for putting the child in a dangerous situation and not maintaining their facility. I doubt the child would be punished because the school wouldn't want to draw any attention to the incident.

For #1 here it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyD9HIMtcU

For #2 Totally Agree!

For #3 It is what happened to me in 6th grade. For a moment, I was in a conundrum, a contradiction, a Hofstadter-Moebius loop (http://everything2.com/title/Hofstadter-Moebius+loop. ) Part of the school rules in their handbook is that vandalism and destruction of property is a no-no. In this case, for me to follow this rule I would have to stay stuck in the bathroom and miss class (which is also a no-no).

In order for me to follow the rule of going to class and getting myself out of the bathroom I would have had to vandalize and destroy their property. Either way, I was breaking their rules no matter what action I took or didn't do. Then I started to think, what if a fire broke out and what if it was an emergency? That made me realize that I had to vandalize and destroy that particular piece of property and break that rule against vandalism and destruction of property to get myself out of this situation.

There are people out there especially right wingers, personal responsibility types, conservatives but not limited to them who want absolute 100% deference and respect to adult and parental authority from children and minors. Therein lies the problem. Hofstadter-Moebius loop incidents are not considered during the construction of rules, morality and values and how to handle them properly.

ASDMommy's kid's school wanted 100% compliance from him. viewtopic.php?f=19&t=229985

To me, to demand 100% compliance is absurd, ludacris and leads to potentially damaging situations and situations with Hofstadter-Moebius loop incidents that have no win.

I believe in rules---but I believe in flexibility as well.

I would actually be quite a loosy-goosy type if I were a parent.

But there are some things I would be inflexible about. One thing: I don't want to hear some kid being a smart-ass to somebody. Always treat people with decency. And don't have every other thing come out of your mouth as a curse.

I'm definitely on board with you on what you say here.

It's pretty easy to control their every decision if you ensure they get to make very few.

It should never be forgotten that preparing for eventual independence is their problem, not yours. If they don't like your terms, you can always kick them out.

Why do you say that?

I don't feel good if kids live under a fascistic regime.

However, I do believe there must be rules and boundaries which kids must learn in order to function in society.

Kids have to learn to experience the slings and arrows of life without crying about every little thing. By the same token, parents must always be a bastion of support for kids.

That is all great thinking there because your post shows how not everything is black and white. There are always exceptions.


Assault is illegal but what happens if you catch someone sexually abusing your child? Should you go to jail and face charges for hitting the man? Most people would say no.

Or what if you had hit rough times in your life and you wouldn't have any money for another week but your kids need to eat. There is no food in the house, they can't wait six days until pay day to eat again. You don't want them to go hungry. So you go to the store and steal groceries and get caught. Should you go to jail for attempted shoplifting? Half and half would say yes. Parents are more likely to say no because going to jail wouldn't solve anything and people without kids are more likely to say yes because there are food banks and food stamps. But not everyone knows where to get free food and not everyone gets enough in foodstamps and they could be in the process of getting them. This sort of thing did actually happen so the police officer bought the mom's groceries for her, only half of them, and gave her resources for where to get free food such as food banks. I remember lot of childfree people ranted about it on their forum and I can understand their frustration because if they did it, they would go to jail but yet if you have children, you get sympathy and don't go to jail. People are more likely to get support when they have children but without kids, it's hard to get it when you are struggling to live.


Yes kids need rules and structure but they also learn there are exceptions to the rules which is probably why they test their limits and test rules. That is how they learn. I can remember testing rules in my self contained classroom because I was trying to see what I can get away with and what rules didn't apply to me because some kids in my class didn't have to follow the same rules the rest of us had to follow. One boy being allowed to run in the classroom showing his penis, one boy being allowed to shout the number nine in a number every time we did counting, one girl being allowed to shriek when someone touches her or rubs her back. Temple Grandin also wrote she tested rules too as a kid to figure out what the rules were.

Sometimes rules are not meant to be taken literal. Sometimes they are just guidelines. For example, a teacher may tell her class she expects everyone to have something to write with in each of her class. There will be no punishment if the student brought nothing to write with. It just means they will have a natural consequence. Not being able to do their school work or having to use one of their passes to go to their locker or get an F for the day for lack of participation. Natural consequence they suffer. They could try and borrow from their neighbor or try to see if the teacher has any extra pencils on her desk but the whole point of the rule is so no one shows up to class without anything to write with and then the teacher is late starting class because everyone had to go to their locker to get a pencil.

Another example is my coach had a rule about no throwing or tossing softball equipment. The coach just doesn't want anyone throwing it in anger but he isn't going to penalize his players for tossing the bat to the dugout when they go up to bat or if one of the players tosses one of the helmets or mitts to their player.

All this was very confusing for me when I was a child because I took everything so literal and I had a hard time with seeing the gray. Everything had to be spelled out to me pretty much and I found it hard to understand the rules because they were not always being followed. That could have been why the new softball coach cut me from his team the following year. He just didn't want to deal with my problems and he was a bus driver and a special ed teacher. He worked both jobs and then he decided to be a softball coach. My mom blamed my troubles with figuring out the rules on the self contained classroom I was in because of the inconsistency.

The main problem when it comes to school, is that it is basically a student factory, which can work out OK if you within a standard deviation or so from the average student they are designed to teach. When you aren't, I think most schools try to make your kid look like what they are designed to handle. I don't want to say they aren't interested in individual children, on an individual level, in certain instances, but as institutions, they aren't.

There are valid reasons to want kids to follow the rules. From their perspective, they can't make the factory run, if they don't. Most kids are not harmed by that because they know when to follow and when not to, or at ;east know when it is relatively OK to test the rules, and have the capacity to contain elements of their behavior that would be problematic.

When they have kids that can't follow rules, and are disruptive, which in all honesty my son was. They don't care about nuance, regardless of safety or anything else, and just want to teach the child 100% compliance because it is easiest for them. Never mind the possible safety issues, just comply with what you are told.

The problem with that is that if you have a child that is capable of that, (mine wasn't) maybe they won't get in trouble anymore, but they don't learn how to tune their radars to keep themselves safe. What if a teacher is a child molester? Should they still comply? Should they keep quiet about it because they were told to? Is that what I want my child to do if his radar goes off that something is unsafe, or bad? That he should disregard it? Do I want him to learn to distrust his own judgement as the default?

What he does need to learn is how to assess the information his radar is giving him. Why is the adult telling me this? Is it safe to do? Is it something trivial, but stupid, and something I should go along with, anyway? Schools do not have the time or energy and honestly resources to spend on this

I'm a huge believer in Kohlberg's stages of moral development. Click here for more information

Obedience is actually a lower-level understanding of ethics and it's part of our job as parents to help guide our children to more complex ways of being.

For my family, we established three basic rules (one, you may notice is a little autism inspired):
•We respect life.
•We respect property.
•When someone speaks, we stop and listen.

Now HOW these rules are enforced depends upon the age and stage of the child. Hopefully, they grow and mature. I actually have a file somewhere with how to respond to each of these issues at each level (that I made up for my family). Because children change and grow...they are moving targets and we must move with them.

Here is a poster I once made with the help of my kids. (They helped with the specific rules under each heading and especially with the picture reminders. I think my kids may have been 2 and 5 at the time.)

With my kids, I have found that the rules needed to be more concrete and more absolute as they were younger, and that they have learned more flexibility as they have gotten older. Really young kids do not have the experience nor the cognitive capacity to "play in the gray." They may not understand the reason for the rule nor be able to recognize when it may not apply. Really young children need to obey their parents without question. They lack the capacity to do otherwise.

Proper parenting, IMHO, seeks to guide a child from obedience to externally set rules that may be absolute, to self-reliance on one's own moral and ethical codes that may or may not be independent from society's "rules." My son is almost 15 and he has a strong sense of morality and justice. I do not worry much about him making wrong choices, except that he can be mislead by clever peers because he can be quite literal. The key for him is to help him figure out who would make a "good" friend, and who wouldn't, based on observation of their general behavior. He has been this way--guided by a strong morality--for many years. My daughter, almost 11, however, still needs a great deal more external structure and guidance. It isn't that she isn't a good person, because she is. She is a moral and ethical person, but sometimes she still needs things to be explained to her for her to "get it." I feel my son was further along than she is by this age. My point in sharing this is that different kids progress at different paces, and it doesn't necessarily mean one is better than or more enlightened than another. It is just that there are many factors that come into play when transitioning to externally imposed rules to internally-driven ethics.

I think that when parents assume kids can handle the gray before they are truly capable is when big problems start to crop up. Or when parents have no understanding of the fact that kids don't enter this world having an innate understanding of "the rules." No kids do. Not even NT ones. They need to be taught. And what that means for each kid may be different and I think, unfortunately, some parents are too immature, too lazy, or too self-centered to figure that out.

I remember there was a mother who was allowing her five year old son kick my ex boyfriend's boots he had on because of something my ex did a year back and I thought in my head "How is that teaching her son proper behavior, kids that young don't understand why they can do something now but not allowed to do it later." To a child's perspective, they will just see the adult keeps on changing the rules. They won't really learn anything.

Consistency, particularly in the formative years, is crucial. It is only when the rule "You don't kick other people" has been firmly established and internalized that you can start to teach when one might be able to kick other people appropriately.

It's interesting to watch how my kids respond differently to the "changing of the rules." Depending upon the circumstances, my daughter will either become angry and sulky, panic and cry, or shut down. (Unless I or her brother are cognizant of the change and explain what is going on). Her brother, on the other hand, will almost always point out the discrepancy. This can cause problems with authority figures because they think he is challenging their authority. Usually he isn't. Usually he is trying to understand why the rule is different in this instance. Then he incorporates that into his own internal schema. Although if there is no underlying reason why the rule is different, he will challenge it if he doesn't agree.

My son is actually turning out exactly the way I "wanted" my kids to turn out before I had any. He is very respectful of others and is generally compliant with rules, but he has his own internal compass and will resist strongly if he disagrees with something on moral or ethical grounds. I have raised my daughter with the same underlying philosophies and belief system, but she is not the same. I think this is the gift that my son's atypical wiring has granted him. My father is much the same way. My daughter's gifts are much more readily observable (she is a gifted artist and smart in the school kind of sense), and I think my son is just now starting to realize how valuable his gift is. He is starting to see how he is different than other kids his age (other than just because of his general weirdness) and I think he is starting to see how there is benefit to it. I ran into one of his classmates a few weeks back and he actually told me he admires my son because "he stands up for what he believes more than any kid our age I have ever seen." That made my heart sing