Life

Tantrum on Tape…Revisited

Last Updated on February 6, 2022

In an earlier post, “Tantrum on Tape,” I wrote about the case of the five year old kindergarten student recently handcuffed by police when she refused to cooperate with school officials and went on a temper tantrum during which she ripped papers off of bulletin boards, threw toys and supplies around the room, climbed up on desks and repeatedly struck an assistant principal who was trying to calm her down.

The child’s family hired a lawyer who promises to bring legal action against the officers who handcuffed the child, who he says had begun to calm down by the time the officers produced the handcuffs.

I suggested in that earlier piece that our schools have been stripped of the authority to do much of the discipline that most of us grew up with. Teachers must rely on “time outs,” it seems, more than anything else to quiet children who are acting up. The problem is, a time out is a passive punishment requiring the cooperation of the child, unlike, for example, spanking, which is done to the child: a time out requires that the child would willingly place herself in an area of isolation and be quiet.

I suggested that in this situation, with a child that would not quiet down and potentially posed a threat to others, that the officer’s actions weren’t necessarily wrong. A few readers responded that if it were their kids, they would have been outraged. I’m no parent, but I share their view on that.

But I’d be more outraged that my child acted in a manner that required police to be called to the school in the first place, whether handcuffs were used or not! I’d like to think that I would be able to produce a child who might respect authority, even if she didn’t necessarily agree with some rule or command she had been given. And if I may go out on a limb, I suggest that the majority of parents who are outraged about the use of handcuffs have taught their children how to behave and how not to behave, so it’s an issue that likely wouldn’t affect their family, anyway.

Today on an afternoon news magazine, I saw more footage from this tape. It runs 30 minutes long, and for roughly six minutes, it shows the school’s teacher and assistant principal calmly trying to coax her out of the room that she had previously turned upside down with her antics. The child, at this point, seems to have calmed down and is perhaps even listening to what she is being told. When the child is finally coaxed out of one room, she starts right up again in another one, attempting to climb up on a desk seven times, according to the report, and hitting the principal who is shown trying to calm her. The tape shows the child making contact with the principal, and I must say that the principal is much more patient than I would have been. (Of course, that’s why I don’t work as a principal.)

It amuses me that anyone would think that I would advocate handcuffing children. Perhaps someone thinks that I actually supply my local schools with handcuffs…just in case. I don’t. And that’s not at all what I’m saying.

The point I was trying to make was this: We have taken away from our schools the ability to effectively discipline students. Years ago, I was asked to speak at my old high school at a career day. While I was talking, I noticed clusters of students in the group of roughly sixty or so, who were talking, misbehaving and being generally inattentive. The teachers watched, sometimes whispered to the children to stop, but didn’t always. I was more annoyed with the teachers who did little to bring their children under control than the children themselves. Some of the teachers were younger, and probably inexperienced. Others were teachers that I had when I had been a student there, and were in no way incapable of controlling a group of students.

But what is the real penalty kids today face when they misbehave? A time out is a wonderful punishment if the child has been raised to understand the reason behind it by parents who take the time to explain it. A child who doesn’t respect authority won’t listen to anyone who orders them to take a time out. A child who has been properly taught the value of other people’s belongings won’t destroy them. A child with a background of proper discipline will not act unruly for thirty minutes, striking at teachers and destroying property. Those of you who have been taught to know better surely knew at age five what was and wasn’t acceptable behavior. I know I was.

Could the police have handled the situation differently? Of course they could. But what would you have had them do? What would you have had the school do when it learned that the child’s mother was at work and not immediately available? How would you have handled the situation when you were dealing with a child who would not listen, would not calm down, and would not stop behaving badly?

 

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.

3 Comments

  • I am a mother of two boys, and this I know. If this little girl was in my sons class, and they didn’t do something to protect my child from her uncontrolled behavior, I would be the one pressing charges. What kind of world do we live in, that teaches our children no consequences for their actions?

    I remember, as a child, getting in trouble for stealing a trivial object from a store, I didn’t get handcuffed, but my parents made me confess to the store manager, and you can bet that left a lasting impression!

    I was spanked as a child and my children would have been spanked for acting out like that. She was very disrespectful to everyone around her and I wouldn’t have tolerated it. It seems to me that her mother enables that kind of behavior by her whole attitude. Someday that child will be in trouble again, and for the rest of her days the blame will fall on society, never on her mother, the true culprit.

    My father once told me a story of a friend who taught his children to listen the first time. They were told one time and after that they would be spanked or disciplined. One day his child lost his footing on the side of a mountain and couldn’t stop himself from running down the side. His father yelled to him to fall down, and without hesitation his son did. He stopped inches away from a very steep cliff. That man never again wondered if he was too harsh on his children, since a little bit of hesitation by his son and it would have been a mute point.

  • I’ll take your points in reverse order:

    Because I’m not a parent myself, I am unqualified to make any judgments? If that’s true, how far do we carry this basic truth into everyday conversations? Since I haven’t made a major motion picture, I shouldn’t have an opinion about the quality of a movie I’ve seen? Since I don’t hold an economics degree, should I not question plans to “save” Social Security? If I’m not a military strategist, should I keep quiet about my opinions with respect to the war in Iraq?

    I’m not a parent. I have not spent any length of time in the difficult effort of raising a child. But I have close friends who have. I’ve seen firsthand what they’re up against. And I have the experience of having BEEN parented, which is very different from simply HAVING parents. I don’t have practical experience of the particular stressors a child can cause…but I have practical experience of what it is like to be in the same room with someone who knows how to give discipline in an effective manner. True, I was on the receiving end at the time, but does that mean that I am incapable of having learned a bigger lesson about how discipline works in the process of having been disciplined? I don’t think so.

    I mean to infer nothing about the child’s parenting. I know nothing more about the child, the parents, or the situation that sparked the behavior than anyone who disagrees with me. The child’s mother may very well be the finest parent on the planet; the school may be run by a collection of dim-witted morons for all I know. That does not change the result: a child was behaving badly, endangering others as well as herself.

    Everyone seems to want to psychoanalyze the child to determine what failed along the way of her young life to determine how we got to this point. It’s easy to do that, whether you’re a parent or not, after the fact.

    My point is that AT THE TIME OF THIS INCIDENT, all of that was moot. They had an unruly child. Period.

    The tape shows that they spent several minutes trying to reason with her. At that point, she had calmed down. She seemed — from what we can tell from the snippets of tape we’ve seen — to be listening, even beginning to cooperate as they tried to coax her out of the classroom where her tirade began. As soon as she gets into the next room, she starts up again, this time climbing on desks. (If they had let her continue to climb on desks and she fell, who’d be at fault then?)

    There was no time AT THAT MOMENT to sit down and try to figure out who was “at fault” for producing the end result: a child who behaved this way. If I had been the child’s parent, I would certainly be shocked that my child would have done this. It would have made me take a long, hard look at what I was doing to raise the child. I would ask a lot of questions of what the school did. But I’d also sit down with the child and we’d watch that tape. We’d talk about every single incident depicted there. I’d want answers.

    But again, AT THAT MOMENT, they had to deal with an immediate problem. They called the child’s mother, who, understandably, was at work and unable to get there immediately. This does not make her a bad parent. Most kids have at least one working parent in their household.

    But for whatever reason — even that that school wasn’t as well-versed in discipline as it should have been — the school was unable to bring the situation under control. So they called the police. What would you have had them do INSTEAD?

    I have friends who use time outs and they do work quite well. I’m not saying that time outs are an ineffective way to discipline. But for a child who REFUSES to quiet down, it seems to me — granted, an unqualified speaker — that it is unlikely that a time out would have worked. Isn’t the point of a time out to make the child sit and think quietly about what they have done? If a child who refuses to stop acting out and destroying other people’s property is isolated in a room, and continues to exhibit this behavior, is the time out working? If, while being in a time out, the child, in the process of destroying something injures herself, wouldn’t everyone consider the school at fault for not monitoring her closely enough? It’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario that our school leaders face far too often in an overly litigious society.

    Finally, look at the first sentence of your comment: …”this Victorian idea that beating a child….” BEATING? The word conjures definite images, doesn’t it? There is a difference between “spanking” a child and “beating” a child, as you surely know. Beating a child is never an acceptable idea. Spanking a child — as you point out — can be “just as effective” according to some more liberal estimates.

    My parents did believe in spanking a child. But this does not mean that this is the only method of discipline they ever used. I can count on one hand — one hand!! — the number of times in my life that I was ever spanked. I hold no emotional scars from this, and I am the first to say that when I was spanked, I deserved it. But you see, just because spanking is part of a parent’s arsenal doesn’t mean — certainly SHOULDN’T mean — that this is ALL they ever do. My parents talked to me, reasoned with me, took away allowances, sent me to my room, (which I guess was the 1970s equivalent of a time out) and took away certain things I liked doing as part of their overall discipline.

    Physical punishment shouldn’t be the only way to go, and certainly shouldn’t be the “easy” way to go: I think THAT is where we run into problems that lead to BEATING children.

    But like any other form of discipline, it is HOW it is employed that determines whether it is appropriate.

  • I’m note sure why you continue to uphold this Victorian idea that beating children is an appropriate way to discipline them. It’s been demonstrated that what you call “passive” discipline (such as a time-out) is just as a effective, if not more so, than physical punishment.

    I do not hit my son, but use time outs. The school also uses time outs. This punishment is so effective that oftentimes the time out itself isn’t even necessary; just the threat of it is enough to guarantee behavior.

    I’m further disturbed by your exegesis in this situation. You infer a great deal about the child’s parenting from this incident, though you don’t know the child, the parents, or even the situation that sparked the initial outburst. Given that you have no experience as a parent or as a caregiver, I hardly think you’re qualified to make any judgments in these areas at all.

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