Why Your Parents Are So Obsessed With Punishment (And Why It’s Not Their Fault)

直接开始正文内容。 If you’ve ever stood in your kitchen, 10 minutes late for school because your mom forgot to wake you up, and watched her yell at you for being disorganized while she simultaneously forgot her own work presentation that morning, you’ve probably asked yourself the same question I did last year: *Why are my parents so obsessed with punishment when they mess up way worse than I ever do?* Let’s set the scene: last Tuesday, I left my math textbook in my locker and didn’t realize until 10 p.m. My mom had to drive 20 minutes back to the school, wait 15 minutes for the janitor to unlock the gym wing, and bring it home. When she walked through the door, she yelled so loud my little brother hid under his bed. She took my phone for a week, called me “irresponsible” and “never going to amount to anything if I can’t even keep track of a $80 textbook,” and didn’t speak to me for two days. Three days later, she forgot her laptop for a big client presentation, called me crying from her car in the office parking lot, and spent 10 minutes apologizing, saying she was “the worst mom ever” and “so sorry she ruined my week by forgetting my textbook.” I stood there holding my textbook, confused: why was I punished for a mistake, but she got off with just an apology? If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. A 2024 survey of 1,200 US teens found that 82% have noticed their parents use harsher rules and punishments for their mistakes than they do for their own, and 76% have seen their parents swing between extreme punishment (yelling, grounding, taking away stuff) and extreme permissiveness (buying them gifts to make up for yelling, doing their homework for them, lying to their teachers to get them out of trouble) with no in-between. For a long time, I thought my mom was just unfair, or that she didn’t care about my feelings as much as she cared about being right. But after I started paying attention, I realized something: almost no parent wakes up in the morning thinking, *I’m going to yell at my kid today and make them feel terrible.* Most of the time, they’re doing the only thing they know how to do. And the reason they only know how to do that is because no one ever taught them anything else. Welcome to Chapter 1: Why Your Parents Are So Obsessed With Punishment (And Why It’s Not Their Fault).

The Two Extremes Every Parent Gets Stuck In

Before we talk about why your parents act the way they do, let’s get clear on what we’re actually talking about. Almost every parent you know falls into one of two unhelpful parenting buckets, no matter how hard they try to be good parents: the punishment bucket, and the permissiveness bucket. (Spoiler: both of these buckets are terrible, for both you and your parents, but we’ll get to that later.)

What counts as punishment, anyway?

When we say “punishment” in this book, we’re not talking about natural consequences that make sense. If you stay out an hour past curfew, a fair consequence is that your curfew is moved up by an hour next weekend. That’s not punishment, that’s a logical result of your choice. Punishment, for our purposes, is any reaction your parent has that’s designed to make you feel bad, scared, or guilty, instead of teaching you how to make a better choice next time. It includes all the stuff you probably already know:

• Yelling, name-calling, or shaming (“I can’t believe you’re so stupid for forgetting that,” “You’re so lazy, you’ll never get into college”)
• Taking away things that have nothing to do with the mistake (grounding you for a month because you forgot to take the dog out, even though you already walked him twice that day)
• Guilt-tripping (“After all I’ve done for you, you treat me like this? I guess I don’t matter to you”)
• Comparing you to other kids (“Why can’t you be more like your cousin who gets straight As and never gets in trouble?”)
• Withholding love or affection (“I’m not going to talk to you until you apologize for being so disrespectful”)

A lot of parents think punishment is the only way to “teach you a lesson.” They’ll say things like “if I don’t punish you, you’ll never learn.” But here’s the thing: punishment doesn’t teach you how to make a better choice. It teaches you how to avoid getting caught. If you get yelled at every time you forget to do the dishes, you won’t learn to remember to do the dishes—you’ll learn to hide your dirty dishes under your bed, or lie and say you already did them. That’s not a lesson, that’s just a new survival skill.

What counts as permissiveness, anyway?

Permissiveness (what the book title calls “spoiling,” but we’ll use the more accurate term permissiveness, because it’s not just about buying you stuff) is the exact opposite of punishment: it’s when your parent lets you get away with anything, no matter how unfair or harmful it is, because they don’t want to upset you, or they feel guilty for not being a “good” parent. It includes stuff like:

• Making excuses for you to teachers, coaches, or friends’ parents when you mess up (lying and saying you were sick when you just forgot to turn in an assignment, telling the soccer coach you can’t come to practice because you’re “stressed” when you just didn’t feel like going)
• Doing your work for you (writing your English essay, finishing your science project, reminding you about every assignment and due date)
• Letting you get away with hurting other people (laughing when you make fun of your little brother, not saying anything when you are rude to your friend, letting you cheat on tests because “you’re stressed”)
• Over-apologizing for their own mistakes, or even for your mistakes (“I’m so sorry I forgot to remind you about the test, it’s my fault you failed,” “I’m so sorry I had to work late, I’ll buy you whatever you want to make up for it”)

A lot of parents swing to permissiveness because they’re terrified of being the “mean parent.” They don’t want you to be mad at them, or they feel guilty for working too much, or they had such strict parents growing up that they swear they’ll never be that way. But permissiveness is just as bad as punishment, because it doesn’t teach you how to take responsibility for your actions, or how to handle disappointment, or how to treat other people with respect. If your mom always lies to your teachers to get you out of trouble, you never learn how to talk to a teacher when you mess up. If your dad always buys you a new game when you’re upset, you never learn how to handle sadness without buying something. The worst part? A lot of parents swing back and forth between punishment and permissiveness like a pendulum, with no in-between. One minute they’re yelling at you for 20 minutes because you forgot to take the trash out, the next minute they’re bringing you ice cream and apologizing for yelling. It’s confusing, it’s unfair, and it makes you feel like you’re walking on eggshells all the time, because you never know which version of your parent you’re going to get.

The Invisible Rulebook Your Parents Never Got to Write

So why do parents keep doing this? Why don’t they just stop yelling, stop guilt-tripping, stop buying you stuff to make up for their mistakes? The short answer: they don’t know any other way. The long answer has a name: the intergenerational parenting cycle.

What the heck is the intergenerational parenting cycle?

The intergenerational parenting cycle is just a fancy way of saying: the way your parents were raised is the only “parenting manual” they have. Unless they intentionally go out and learn new ways to parent, they’re going to copy exactly what their parents did to them, even if they hated it. Let me give you an example. My friend Javi is 17, and his dad’s go-to punishment when Javi gets a bad grade is to yell at him for 20 minutes and take his gaming console for a month. Javi hates it, obviously. Last year, he asked his dad why he does that, and his dad said, “That’s what my dad did to me when I got a C in 10th grade math. It made me