Reward and Punishment In Parenting And Government

Before becoming a parent, I knew that I wanted to do it differently. I didn’t want to punish, I didn’t want to shout. I had an inkling that parenting could be done peacefully and compassionately, although exactly how to do it, I didn’t yet know. This knowing I think came from an influential conversation I had with my Tai Chi teacher when I was in my early twenties. He’d had a difficult childhood. He’d been adopted and abused, and struggled with dyslexia. At one point he spent time in a remand centre where a Tibetan monk was taking care of him. The monk didn’t get angry at him, he wasn’t reactive to his misbehaviour and craziness. Overtime, the monk was able to help him learn to read.

This story reminded me of a dyslexic boy in my class when I was at school. He was violent and disruptive. I’d helped him learn to use a dictionary and noticed just how different he was on a 1-1 basis than when the teacher was addressing the whole class. A while later this boy left our school and went to a different one, with smaller class sizes, and a different approach to teaching. When I bumped into him on the street it seemed like he was a completely different person, so much more mature and self-aware. It was a huge lesson in how people aren’t ‘bad’. They just have difficult experiences, and need the right kind of attention to fulfil their potential.  

When I became a mother, I had many questions about the practical nature of how to parent peacefully, and how to set limits. I didn’t have the peaceful superpowers of a monk, but I did have a strong curiosity to find answers. I discovered a wonderful organisation called Hand in Hand Parenting, and trained to be a parent educator with them when my daughter was one year old. From Hand in Hand, I learnt a revolutionary approach to setting limits that comes from the understanding that our children actual want to be ‘good,’ they want to co-operate with us, it’s just that sometimes their upset feelings from difficult experiences and trauma get in the way. When a child refuses to do something, and doesn’t want to co-operate, they aren’t deliberately being naughty. They simply need listening, and help to process the feelings that get in the way of their clear-thinking. When we want to set our child to co-operate we can help them by building trust, spending 1-1 time with them doing the things they love, spending time helping them to process their upsets, while holding a limit about whatever behaviour we want to stop, or whatever we need them to do. 

And it works, it really works. We really don’t need to use force. We don’t need to shout, and although we need time to take care of our own feelings so we don’t project them onto our child, we actually don’t need to be a Monk to be a peaceful parent.

Imagine what the world would be like if every child was brought up like this, peacefully and compassionately, with an understanding that their feelings mattered, and that their voice would always be heard?

Now, back in 2020 when the lockdown happened, I found myself full of feelings. I felt lonely and isolated. I felt angry at the government. I was enraged that they were pretending to care about people’s health, but were using oppressive measures that were harmful. And I didn’t have trust.

And I thought about the listening approach to parenting I had learnt, and how strange it actually felt to have my life controlled by a force that I couldn’t communicate with. There was no dialogue, no trust-building, just relentless fear propaganda, and a list of fines and punishments for those who did not comply.

Our government works by punishment and reward. It attempts to achieve compliance through enticing rewards, and fearful punishments. And there is always going to be a subsection of society, that doesn’t want to play this manipulative game. I wouldn’t do this to my child, and I don’t expect to be governed this way in a so-called democracy. 

Reward and punishment may achieve compliance, but they erode relationships, they erode trust. People comply to get a reward if they deem it is worth it, or they comply out of fear to escape a punishment. But if you don’t want the reward, or you don’t fear the punishment, because you have an inner sense of right and wrong that transcends the game, then this style of governance fails.

It is interesting to me that many of those who do not want the vaccine, or have taken the vaccine but don’t want the vaccine passports, or respect the right to body autonomy, are those that have chosen a different way for their families, who are making more compassionate choices for their relationships. We are evolving away from old-school forms of existing in this world, and yet now we are faced with a government that has gone into punishment overdrive. The hate and division created by the media, name-calling with terms such as ‘anti-vaxxers,’ is complicit in this too, weaponising the public into being actively involved in the punishment of those who want to maintain bodily choice.

And the hatred is essential, because when an unvaxxed friend is denied medical care, or not allowed on a bus, they will have to be hated in order to condone it.

We as humans are better than this, and our evolution depends on continuing to listen, to communicate, to build trust with each other. Any person, government leader, or media outlet, that is seeding hate, and doling out punishments is part of an old paradigm that

we are evolving away from. The charming narcissist that pretends to love you, and then turns on you the moment you don’t comply with their ever increasing demands. Our power structures are sick and mentally ill, and this is a call to anyone who wants to live in a more compassionate way.

You are either with us, or with them. It really is that simple. I don’t think that an aggressive, hate-filled, punishment-laden agenda will be able to continue indefinitely and at some point it will self-destruct. Then we can turn our knowledge, skills and hearts towards building the more peaceful world. I hope that you will join us there.

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Read more about Hand in Hand Parenting in my book; Tears Heal: How to listen to our children.