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Parents threaten their children all the time for all sorts of reasons and the threats often contain explicit sanctions. Eat your peas or no ice cream for desert. Do your homework or no TV for you! The reason parents resort to threats to gain compliance is not difficult to understand. The tactic often works.
The larger question we should ask is: can we not think of a wiser way? Parents, and institutions as well, that subject children to threats are teaching them a pattern to follow in their own lives. The lesson children can take away is that retribution is meted out for transgression, and the strong get to punish the weak. But, this logic is exactly the way tyrants think. Our legal system has many safeguards in place to try and insure that justice is fair. However the safeguards often fail, especially where religious abuse of children is a factor.
Yet as time goes by we become more enlightened and there are thoughtful informed people who seriously question the paradigm of crime and punishment. Rehabilitating criminals is a long and costly endeavor so regrettably it seems we have abandoned rehab in favor of simply locking the convicted away.
The alternative to tyrannical methods is simply to insist children reason about their decisions. Instead of memorizing rules, teach children to reason about which actions to take in life. Sanctions meted out by a supernatural force would not seem to be a healthy scheme to carry with you in life. The idea a supernatural force is always watching and judging would surely lead to paranoia in many people. A fact we can observe if we are careful.
There is a better way.
"Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.”
― Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A'S, Praise and Other Bribes
“In short, with each of the thousand-and-one problems that present themselves in family life, our choice is between controlling and teaching, between creating an atmosphere of distrust and one of trust, between setting an example of power and helping children to learn responsibility, between quick-fix parenting and the kind that's focused on long-term goals.”
― Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason
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