What ‘Go to Your Room’ Teaches Kids About Dealing With Emotions
One of the most common techniques for disciplining children can encourage them to suppress, rather than express, how they’re feeling.
For almost as long as children have had rooms, parents have been sending them there as punishment.
But while barking “Go to your room!” surely represents an improvement over what used to be an all-too-common punishment for children—spanking—it can introduce problems of its own. As some child-development experts told me, the saying can work against a parent’s goal of raising a considerate kid.
“What do we think is going to happen when they go to their room?” asks Laura Markham, a psychologist who founded the site Aha! Parenting (ahaparenting.com) and promotes a model she calls “peaceful parenting.” Children may emerge.
