A lot of people around me are having kids and every day it becomes more apparent that hitting your children to punish them is insane because literally everything can be a horrible punishment in their eyes if you frame it as such.
Like, one family makes their toddler sit on the stairs for three minutes when he hits his brother or whatever. The stairs are well lit and he can see his family the whole time, heās just not allowed to get up and leave the stairs or the timer starts over. He fucking hates it just because itās framed as a punishment.
Another family use a baseball cap. Itās just a plain blue cap with nothing on it. When their toddler needs discipline he gets a timeout on a chair and has to put the cap on. When theyāre out and about he just has to wear the cap but it gets the same reaction. Nobody around them can tell heās being punished because itās in no way an embarrassing cap, but HE knows and just the threat of having to wear it is enough.
And there isnāt the same contempt afterwards Iāve seen with kids whose parents hit them. One time the kid swung a stick at my dog, his mother immediately made him sit on the stairs, he screamed but stayed put, then he came over to my dog and gently said āSorry Ellieā and went back to playing like nothing happened, but this time without swinging sticks at the nearby animals.