Parents: "children should be taught that actions have consequences"
Okay, let them stay up till 5 in the morning and feel like shit for the next day, eat a bag of candy in one go and have a huge stomach ache, go out without an umbrella and catch a cold, watch a violent movie and get scared?
Parents: "actually, we mean screaming and beating the crap out of them when they try to do these things"
this is the shit that my mom did to me and it actually worked
if you scribble on your toys with marker, you're gonna have scribbled toys, and they'll be ugly. if you break your toys on purpose, you wont get new ones. if you refuse to get dressed in the morning, then you'll be dragged to school in your pajamas. if you don't clean up your room, i wont come tuck you in.
it worked a hell of a lot better than being screamed at.
That's not better, actually.
Children should be allowed to draw on their stuff without it being considered ugly and break it without that being a reason to not buy them anything. Safe destructive actions are necessary for development. That's part of what toys are for.
And nobody should be dragged to school, period.
What you're talking about aren't consequences, it's still punishments created by adults.
To a child, consequences are the direct results of a child's actions.
Anything that involves "because I did that, my parents did this" is now a consequence of the parent's actions. Negative consequences of parent's actions designed to coerce obedience are punishments.
These are the necessary definitions you need to understand before entering this conversation, so that you can understand why your parents' actions here are being described as punishment.
There are appropriate ages for a child to develop a complex understanding of others' thoughts and begin grasping that they can "cause" others to act in particular ways by impacting others' internal thoughts (not just by completing an input-output pattern). And there are safe ways to encourage developing that type of meta cognition.
Neglecting your young child's need for ritual and affection before the difficult task of being in a dark space alone with no way out is neither age appropriate nor safely encouraging development.
If a child is young enough that they need the emotional support of rituals like being tucked in, they are also young enough that their understanding of others' thoughts is limited. That's the developmental stage they are in. So, all they are learning is a pattern. They are learning, "my safety network is contingent on obedience to rules no one has explained to me or allowed me to explore. If I want the output of safety, only the input of obedience is accepted."
That is a punishment. It is a coercion to obedience caused by applying negative stresses on a child.
You can understand what your mother was trying to do now, thanks to your more complete social and neurological development. But you literally could not understand it then. All she was doing was hurting you in a way that made you obey.
And the reality is that when you hurt a child to make them obey you, when you equate safety to obedience? You equate safety to abuse, and it sets that child up for a lifetime of horrors that I sincerely hope you have been fortunate enough to avoid.
